


Vulcan Mine

by therev



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-04-24 20:26:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4934110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therev/pseuds/therev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. A divided Vulcan is at civil war and at war with the Federation. After crash-landing on Vulcan, McCoy and Spock must work together to survive the desert and the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day 1

**Author's Note:**

> Strongly inspired by the awesome 80s movie _Enemy Mine_ with significant differences (there's no baby!), and helped along by _Lawrence of Arabia_. AOS characterization, mostly because I can't imagine DeForest Kelley tromping through the desert and saying "fuck" a lot.
> 
> Some of the Vulcan locations are shifted about. Some things I just made up. It's AU.
> 
> Illustrations by the awesome [Kethavel](http://kethavel-art.tumblr.com/)! Thank you!

[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/la_reverenda/12238487/4537/4537_800.jpg)

DAY ONE

McCoy woke with hot sand in his mouth, in his eyes, everywhere. He coughed, choked when he inhaled red dust and sat up, bent over, coughed some more, the thin atmosphere little help to his desperate lungs.

The sun was only just rising over the dunes, dark red and huge and already hot. He'd read that the Vulcan sun was never as bright as Earth's, even though it burned hotter, and something about the dim glare made him uneasy.

He tried to stand and when that failed he kneeled. Behind him the tracks in the sand where he had crawled from the transport wreckage snaked back to the downed craft, still smoking but no longer burning. There was no one else alive. He had made it out even as they burned. They were already dead, he knew. It was little comfort. He wiped his eyes, the sweat on his forehead stung at his burned hands and he cursed.

Orange dunes surrounded him, obscuring sight as he willed himself at last to stand, to climb, the burns on his hands screaming when he stumbled and had to crawl in the hot sand. At the top of a dune he scanned the horizon. Rust-colored hills as far as he could see, except, there, a thin, blue line of smoke rising. Perhaps a Federation fighter. Perhaps enemy.

He slid down the dune, crawled up another, and another, until he lost count and he had to rest, panting, sucking in the thin air desperately. He had a medkit but he would save it, either for any of the fighter crew that might be alive, or for himself when he was desperate.

Hours passed and he walked and rested and climbed, until the sun was too high, too hot, and he took shelter in the shortening shadow of one of the dunes, pulled his overshirt off and wrapped it around his head and neck, and waited.

It was near dark when he woke and he cursed again for falling asleep, but the hottest part of the day had passed and the night was not yet dark. In the distance, the smoke rose grey now.

When he was close, he slowed, bending down to make a smaller target. He saw no one standing or walking around the ship, heard no voice or other sound. A flame flickered among the wreckage, fuel still burning, but he could not see any identifying marks. Jim would know the ship, its planet of origin, by the shape of the fuselage or the goddamned rudder, but Jim wasn't there and McCoy had never paid enough attention.

An hour passed, maybe less, as he waited, lying on his belly in the sand, until caution gave way to desperation, to thirst, and he approached the vessel. It smelled of burning fuel and burning flesh and he covered his mouth as he entered through the gaping hole in the side. It didn't look like a Federation ship but it was definitely a fighter. It was too charred and broken to tell him much else. He climbed carefully, surrounded by hot, sharp edges, and in the dimming light he searched for something that could be used to make a torch. He found only hard surfaces and metals. What he really wanted was water, but when he slipped it was on blood, and even in the firelight he couldn't make out the color. 

The bodies themselves gave away the ship's origin, though not its allegiance, as he encountered the green men he'd been warned about, looking too human and no more green than any other dead humanoid. Only the ears looked out of place. This one might have been a pilot, he thought, it's body near the navigation controls, but then it could have been tossed from anywhere. That one might have been a gunner, its hands black with soot. There was no way to tell if they were rebels or army.

McCoy checked each body for a pulse, no matter how hopeless each looked, enemy or not.

He found water, a huge tank of it, and drank it by the handful, splashed it onto his neck, let it run over the burns on the backs of his hands, too warm to be much comfort. It hissed as it dripped onto the hot metal floor and he realized his boots were melting where he stood.

He needed jugs, canteens, anything that could hold water before it boiled or evaporated away, or before this heap exploded with him in it. He began searching with less caution, throwing open bulkhead doors, equipment tumbling out noisily.

"Goddamn vulcans don't need to carry goddamn water on a goddamn desert planet, have they got fucking humps or what?" he said to himself, finding nothing.

A voice answered him and he spun to see a shape outlined in the torn-out hull, black against the dim orange glow of light outside. It spoke in a guttural language that sounded as harsh as the sand, but quietly, as if speaking took some effort. Something that McCoy felt certain was a weapon was pointed at him.

McCoy stood still, the voice grew louder, demanding one repeated phrase. He had heard Vulcan before but only from clumsy Terran tongues and it had sounded nothing like this. He lifted his hands, hoping it would be understood as surrender. A light flashed, the weapon fired, aimed wildly, and the body crumpled all at once.

It took McCoy a moment to realize he was unharmed, and another to decide what to do. He picked his way carefully over to the unconscious body, a man, a Vulcan, half slumped against the bulkhead, black and green gore covering one side of his head, a long gash down his leg, but he found a pulse skipping steadily against the soft throat.

Hot wind blew into the wreckage, bringing sand and a sense of warning. The Vulcan looked harmless when unconscious, young even, with wild, dark hair that blew in the breeze, and a strangely grey pallor that McCoy thought probably meant he had lost a lot of blood. But he wasn't harmless, he still held that weapon, sort of like a phaser, which McCoy finally had the presence of mind to take and turn on its owner.

McCoy could help him, or he could leave him, or he could blast him with his own weapon or even bash his head in and save the phaser power.

"Do no fucking harm," he told himself, sighing, and tucked the gun into the back of his belt.  
___

Night fell, bright with starlight in the open desert, bathing the dunes in low amber light. McCoy squinted, bent over the Vulcan's body, kneeling beneath the shelter of a fighter wing, broken off from the ship and lodged deep into the sand. In the dim light and the flicker of a makeshift torch, his vision faded in and out of sharpness, fatigue and hunger catching up to him. He rinsed a cloth in a concave bit of ship's hull which he had filled with water, blinked past the blur in his vision, and continued to clean the Vulcan's wounds.

In his scavenging he had finally found jugs and filled them with water, tarpaulins (or blankets, he couldn't tell) of unknown but unburned material the color of the sand, and a half-melted container the size of a footlocker filled with vacuum-sealed packs he had hoped were food, but when he opened one there was only a waxy bar with no discernable smell or use. He found several instruments that could have been compasses, their needles swinging wildly, pointing to indecipherable symbols, useless to him but not, he assumed, to a Vulcan. These he had carried along the same path in the sand where he had dragged the Vulcan's body from the wreckage, beneath the lee of the separated wing, far enough to be safe from any explosions.

A closer examination had revealed the head wound to be less critical than it looked but the gash on the outside of the right calf that would need stitches. He cleaned the head first, quickest and easiest, wrapped it with a piece of material cut from the tarpaulin, some kind of synthetic woven canvas, strong enough that he had been unable to tear it by hand, yet soft enough to wrap like cloth, light and breathable and absorbent, then set about cleaning the leg. He didn't have a dermal regenerator in his kit, but he had a backup needle and sutures and it was just as well that the Vulcan was passed out. 

When he finished, he scanned the body, the readings still baffling but stable. His vision faded out again, the scanner blurring, and he tried to blink past it, nearly finished, nearly time to rest. One last check, to feel for himself. He slid his hand beneath the dark robe where he knew the Vulcan's heart should be. Even through the heavy material of the battle suit the Vulcan wore beneath his robe he could feel the quick flutter, fast like a rabbit's or Jo's pet gerbil. McCoy laughed softly, wondering if this creature would appreciate such a comparison.

A strong hand gripped his wrist, wresting it away and in the flicker of torchlight the Vulcan's eyes were fire bright. He was talking again, speaking in that same language and just as demanding, repeated phrases that McCoy couldn't understand but if he had to guess were something like 'get your goddamned hands off of me.'

"Now just wait," McCoy said gently. He still had the Vulcan's phaser tucked in his belt but the briefings at Starfleet had said that they were just as lethal hand-to-hand. "I'm a doctor, understand? Healer. Medicine. Uh...." he struggled, then remembered the one phrase he'd been told to remember if no other, "hassu! Hassu!"

The Vulcan's speech stopped abruptly but he did not release McCoy. He watched him, gaze as intense as the Vulcan sun, eyes dark and too knowing, so that McCoy felt inexplicably bared by them. Slowly, the Vulcan began to relax, to lower his head back to the ground, to the blanket McCoy had laid out for him, but then the hand that gripped McCoy's wrist went to McCoy's face and the Vulcan mumbled something just as a light flared behind McCoy's eyes. It burned, whatever the Vulcan was doing to him, it burned his mind, and though he'd never believed the stories about life flashing before one's eyes, his did, and then it went black.

 


	2. Day 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A storm.

DAY TWO

McCoy dreamed of summer, of hot afternoons lounging on his grandmother's porch in the shade. In his dream he was a child though he understood things as adults understand them. He left the shade of the porch and walked to the road, the asphalt too hot on his feet. He could hear his grandmother call from behind him but he did not turn, did not stop, until he stood on an embankment of a dried up river bed, soil caked and cracked in intricate puzzle shapes, and on the opposite shore a dark figure waited, cloaked in a shroud so black it might have been night. In the depths of it, a thousand points of starlight. The figure shifted. Something touched his hand.

The sun was already high when he woke and his head pounded when he lifted it. The thing that touched his hand was small and furry and had sharp teeth, he knew because it was gnawing on his fingertips. He struck at it and missed and it scurried away when he cursed it. Overhead, the tarpaulin canopy flapped and he was grateful that he was still beneath it, that his skin hadn't been cooked by that harsh sun. Next to him, the Vulcan lay unconscious again.

He drank his fill of water and risked a little of the painkiller he had in his medkit hypo. His head was really killing him. 

"What the hell did you do to me?" McCoy asked the prone figure, leaning over the Vulcan cautiously. In the full light of day he didn't look so young, maybe even near McCoy's age but then he knew they lived to be hundreds of years old. The features were resting more softly, not the fitful pain they showed the night before, and he wanted to risk checking for fever but he remembered those dark, accusing eyes and decided against it. They were all he could see when he closed his own. 

There was a sound overhead, a craft. It could be Federation or it could be Vulcan, rebel or not, he had no way of knowing, but he stuck his head out from under the canopy anyway and squinted up at the dark shape against the backdrop of the copper-colored sun. Jim could be on that shuttle for all he knew. He could flag them down and save his ass or he could get blasted from the sky, a burning pile of ash named Leonard McCoy on a godforsaken planet he hadn't even wanted to go to.

He shook his head and moved back under the cover of the canopy and waited for the high keen of the engines to pass. He thought.

This is what he had. He had a partial medkit, a dwindling water supply, an unconscious enemy, and a pounding headache. This is what he needed. He needed a plan, a map to the nearest outpost, and a way to get there. He needed food, first and foremost. If he didn't have that soon, the rest of it didn't matter.

When he next crawled out from under the shelter it was with a tarpaulin draped over his head and shoulders, a makeshift keffiyeh, wire scavenged from the wreckage holding it in place over his forehead, like some kind of salvage yard sheikh, armed with a phaser and a steel shank of electrical conduit.

"You stay here," he said to the Vulcan, grimaced when there was no response, and climbed to the top of the nearest dune using the conduit like a staff. The pain in his head had eased and so had the burns on his hands, but the gravity and thin air and hunger weighed him down. At the top he found only dunes in every direction. If the vulcan lived, he might be able to tell him which way to head for the outpost. He might show him how to use the instruments he thought could be compasses. He might bash his head in and leave him to cook in the sand.

He climbed back down the dune, sliding in the sand toward the wreckage. The weasel that had gnawed on him was probably a scavenger; he might find more of them there. It would mean eating game which had likely recently fed on the bodies of the dead Vulcans but he couldn't be picky.

The sun was high overhead and he kept the shelter, the broken wing, in sight. From this distance the sand-colored canopy hid it well, but the tip of the wing glinted in the sunlight.

An hour passed as he sifted through the wreckage. The fires were finally out. He wondered if there was any fuel which hadn't burned, tapped the tank and a faint tinkling sound echoed from inside. If he caught one of those critters he could use it for cooking fuel. Better to risk the chemical fumes than uncooked whatever the hell it was.

He found the first Whatever-The-Hell gnawing on the pilot, peeling away its face and he regretted not having buried the bodies the night before. He shot it anyway, almost a reflex, still undecided if he could actually eat it, but the phaser-like gun all but obliterated it and that was that decision made.

He found two more, stunned on a lower setting. He would need to break their necks. It was him or them and yet he hesitated, their fur soft as a cat's, heart beating steadily under his thumb as he thought of the one he'd shot too easily. He didn't take life, that wasn't the vow he made. He cursed.

He had laid them down in the sand, in the shade of the wreckage, when a breeze blew cool into his face. It smelled rancid at first, blowing through the fuselage where the dead Vulcans still lay, then earthy and clean, and he closed his eyes, taken aback by anything so pleasant in that place.

The howl that followed was less pleasant, and when he opened his eyes the sky, the land, was all one solid wall of orange rolling across the dunes to block out the light. He turned and ran, the shelter still visible and though the sand whipped up suddenly all around him he kept his eyes open, concentrating on that one fixed point. After a while he couldn't run, he couldn't see, but he could hear the flap of the shelter's canopy and he let that lead him, wrapping the tarpaulin on his head tight around his face until he tripped over the Vulcan's body and fell down beside it, the sand already banking up over it, the canopy flapping wildly, no longer pinned down. 

The Vulcan was heavier than he looked and McCoy was tired, breathless and sucking in dust, but he wrestled the body up out of the sand, closer to the base of the wing, and struggled to wrap them both in the tarpaulin together, lying against the Vulcan and tucking it around them, using their bodies to anchor it. The Vulcan didn't wake, not as McCoy pushed and shoved his body around, not even when the howling grew so loud McCoy would have sworn there was a train passing by outside. That Vulcan heart still beat, however. He could feel it, pressed so close.

Their shelter held, the fabric deceptively strong, though the air was stifling and even thinner beneath it. Eventually the sand banked up around them and McCoy didn't even have to hold it so tightly. He just had to hope they wouldn't be buried alive.

When the howling stopped and the tarpaulin was still, he dug his way out. It took some effort and time, half buried as they were, but even the thin Vulcan air was sweet to his lungs when he pulled himself free and tasted it. 

It was dusk.

"Fat lot of help you are, pal," he said to the Vulcan as he dug out the body and the footlocker and reset the canopy. The sand was banked so high against the opposite side of the wing it was a miracle it hadn't toppled and crushed them and he cursed himself for not thinking of that possibility. 

As he dug, searching for the compass-like instruments, he found instead a large, dark, and wet patch of sand: their water, soaking into the red Vulcan earth.

McCoy sat heavily and watched the Vulcan in the dimming light. He looked peaceful, untroubled, and McCoy envied that.

"One more day, buddy," he said to the body. "Then you're on your own and I'm… probably dead anyway."

He spun where he sat and lay next to the body, reached up to pull the canopy so that he could watch the brightening stars as night fell. Overhead two points of light burned especially bright next to each, one silver one brilliant red, staring down like some chimeric god. His stomach growled.

He sang softly, tiredly. "Pulled into Nazareth, was feeling 'bout half past dead…."


	3. Day 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The enemy awakens.

DAY THREE

The Vulcan was gone. 

McCoy woke and he was alone. He had no water and no phaser and no unconscious Vulcan and the sun was just cresting the dunes.

"Goddammit," he said, and hauled himself up wearily to search the immediate area, then to crawl on hands and feet up the nearest dune, turning a full circle at the top, finding only sand and wreckage and his sad little shelter beneath the broken wing. "Goddammit," he said again, then slid down the dune and headed toward the wreckage, but found nothing there, not even the bodies of the dead. He paced back to the shelter but found nothing below the canopy but the footlocker and the indentations of two bodies in the sand. "Goddammit."

He sat beneath the shelter, the sun already climbing, and thought.

This is what he had. He had nothing. This is what he needed. He needed water and food and a map to the outpost and a way to get there, or, barring those things, he need to get off this fucking planet. 

A shadow passed by overhead as he mumbled low to himself, possibly a craft, possibly the vulcan equivalent of a vulture. It stopped. When he looked up there was a silhouette on the canopy in the shape of a man, or the shape of a Vulcan.

"Hassu," a voice called.

McCoy stuck his head out from under the canopy, squinted up with one eye open, to the towering dark shape robed in black, a phaser aimed at his head. 

He ducked back under the shelter. "Yeah, perfect, come on in," he said, waving a hand so that the invitation would be understood. "Let's have a chat, you ungrateful jackass."

The canopy lifted and fell away, plucked out of its conduit stakes.

"Great," Mccoy said, squinting up, "thank you. That's exactly what I hoped you'd do."

The Vulcan looked at him strangely, McCoy could tell even though his face was shadowed. He threw something at McCoy and McCoy flinched as small, green lumps landed at his feet. When they didn't explode and didn't bite him, McCoy picked one up. It was soft, tough-skinned with small areoles, like a cactus that had been plucked of its spines.

"Where the hell did you find these?" McCoy asked but the Vulcan didn't answer. It could have been a trick, they could have been poisonous, but he was going to die without food or water anyway so he popped one into his mouth. It was bitter and sticky and spongy and wonderful. He followed it with the rest of them, not even bothering to clean them, sand gritting between his teeth, tiny hairs prickling at his lips.

As he was eating the Vulcan finally sat and McCoy could see him a little better. His face was partly obscured by a black cloth draped over his head, matching his robe. The bandaging on his head had been removed and the wound looked almost healed. 

"Nice to see you up and around," McCoy said around the sticky plant stuff. "I think."

The Vulcan watched him.

"I wasn't the one that killed your buddies, just so you know. I'm a doctor, not a fighter. Doctor," he said again, pointing at his chest. "Hassu."

The Vulcan inclined his head a little at that word and McCoy was sorry it was the only one he knew. 

"I would have helped them too but they were already… anyway." He looked at the Vulcan's legs, crossed beneath him. "How's your leg?" he asked, pointing.

The Vulcan stared and McCoy stretched out his own leg, pulled up the cuff of his pants and made exaggerated cutting motions toward his calf. "How, um…. Pain? Or…" he reached out. "Here, just let me see."

The Vulcan stopped him with a show of the phaser and McCoy held up his hands in surrender. "Fine," he said, "let the damned thing fall off for all I care."

"I understand you, Doctor, I simply do not wish you to touch me," the Vulcan said and McCoy gaped.

"You speak Standard?"

"Obviously."

McCoy grimaced, pulling down his pants leg and feeling foolish. "Well you could have said so."

"I just did," the Vulcan said.

"You speak smartass, too. That's nice. You're welcome for the medical attention, by the way. That's on the house."

"And you are welcome for the meal."

"Yeah," McCoy said sincerely, crossing his legs in front of him. "Thanks for these. Really. You could have killed me instead."

"And you I," the Vulcan said.

"So maybe you don't need that phaser since I had plenty of opportunity while you were unconscious."

The Vulcan watched him for a few moments, then put the phaser away, disappearing it somewhere beneath that robe.

McCoy cleared his throat, uncertain now how to proceed. The sun was growing hotter and he was already sweating. The Vulcan was not.

"My name's McCoy, Leonard McCoy," he said at last, and when the Vulcan didn't offer his name McCoy asked.

"Spock," the Vulcan said simply.

"Just Spock?"

"It is sufficient for your needs," Spock said.

"You rebel or army, Spock?"

Spock laughed, quietly, bitterly, with a shadowy smile that was barely there and made him look dangerous. "I am Vulcan, Doctor."

"Yeah, but who do you fight for?"

"I fight for myself and my people."

McCoy shook his head. "Jesus, kid, this is getting us nowhere. Look, I don't care who you're loyal to, I just need to get to the nearest Federation outpost. Now I know there's one here 'cause that's where I was headed, in a transport full of medical supplies that either you or your other Vulcan buddies shot out of the sky and I had to watch them all burn up along with the crew, so thanks for that. But I've got to get back to my people and you probably do too, so if you could point me in the right direction, I'd be obliged."

Spock no longer smiled, dark gaze once again making McCoy feel too vulnerable, especially with the glaring sun beating down on him.

At last Spock said, "Vulcan is larger than you must imagine, Doctor, and the outpost too far. There will be no search parties as the desert disrupts scanning equipment. You would die without some assistance and regardless of your origin or allegiance, a life debt is not one a Vulcan takes lightly, and you have indebted me to you."

"Indebted? Would you have preferred I let you die?"

"Life is always preferable, but it would not have been a dishonorable death."

"All death is dishonorable, Mr. Spock," McCoy said, angrily though even he wasn't sure why. "There's no fairness or integrity in it, you know why? Because you're dead."

Spock smirked. "You argue like the unreformed, Doctor, and like them you stray from the point."

"I've forgotten it by now," McCoy said, shading his face. His head was swimming. "It's this goddamned sun."

"The sun is in fact material to the point. You must find your outpost and I must join my people. Those destinations lie in the same direction for approximately four days' travel time on foot. You would die without a guide and I owe you a life debt. I can offer assistance as repayment, after which our paths will both literally and figuratively diverge."

"Swell," McCoy said, panting. 

Spock sighed. "It is the radiation. It is different from your yellow Earth sun. It is affecting you especially now that you are malnourished. You should not be uncovered if you can avoid it."

"Well I was avoiding it," McCoy said and stood, swaying. He bent over to steady himself, hands on his knees, waiting for the ground to stop moving, "but someone took down my shelter."

Spock stood as McCoy struggled to reseat the canopy but he did not move to help.

"You cannot travel now," he said. "We set out at dusk."

"Well where are you going?" McCoy asked when Spock turned toward the wreckage.

"I suggest you rest, Doctor. We shall walk all night."

McCoy did rest, he had no choice. Eventually his head stopped spinning and he slept, but some time before dusk he woke and looked toward the wreckage to see a column of blue-black smoke rising. A funeral pyre he guessed, and when Spock returned with more of the small prickly fruit he smelled of smoke and fuel but McCoy didn't ask, only thanked him.

At dusk they packed their few things. Spock had salvaged more water from the wreckage which he kept in a soft, flat canteen that disappeared, as so many things did, beneath the black robe. He wrapped some of the waxy bars (which did turn out to be food of a sort, a solidified form of Vulcan-based electrolytes) in a tarpaulin and bound it with more electrical wire and slung it over his shoulder. McCoy carried only his medkit, a small sack full of the prickly fruit, and a rod of the metal conduit to use as a walking stick. He wore one of the tarpaulins over his head even though the sun was already setting.

Spock did not speak as they set out. He did not say where they were going and McCoy did not ask. The Vulcan was too far ahead anyway, always a dark shape just visible against the horizon. Even with the leg injury, which presented as the slightest of limps, Spock was too fast for McCoy, but every time he would lose sight of him over a dune, he would scramble up hurriedly to find Spock waiting patiently at the bottom on the other side.

They rested after a few hours and again a couple of hours after that; it was obvious the breaks were for McCoy's sake. Yet by the time they stopped near morning, Spock's limp had become more pronounced and when McCoy caught up to him and they made their separate shelters of bent conduit and tarpaulins, the bandage on Spock's leg was dark with blood.

"You've got to let me look at that," McCoy said, sitting outside of his shelter, so tired after the long night, and the dawn just beginning to lighten the sky. 

"It is not necessary, Doctor," Spock said, standing over McCoy as he removed his robe for the first time since McCoy had first seen him, all slim, dark lines in that matte black battle suit which should have looked clumsy and lumpy with all of its pockets and hidden places but somehow didn't.

"It could be infected. I shouldn't have let you walk on it."

"I am curious how you would have stopped me," Spock said with a smirk and McCoy thought that was a good point, really.

"I've got a hypospray, do you know what that is?" He waited until Spock nodded. "Well I can give you an antibiotic. I didn't before because I wasn't sure what it would do to you."

"And you are certain now?"

"Well, no, not really. But you're awake now so you can tell me if there seems to be any strange effect."

Spock shook his head, sitting at last outside of his shelter so that McCoy didn't have to strain to look up him, but that gaze up close was another thing entirely. "I prefer not to be your experiment, Doctor. Have you considered that Vulcan bacteria may not be remotely like Terran bacteria and thus your medicines will have no effect?"

"'Course I did, Spock," McCoy said, giving a smirk of his own, "but I also considered that I, a human, with all my Terran bacteria, am the one who stitched you up."

Spock conceded, but with irritation in his voice. "Logical, however, you will excuse me if I still object to a treatment with an untested outcome."

"Yeah, yeah, do no harm, I got it. At least let me check the stitches."

Spock watched him closely, quietly, and after a moment extended his leg toward McCoy. McCoy carefully removed the boot and unwrapped the bandaging, now stiff as the blood was drying. The irritated flesh was an odd purple hue rather than red, but the stitches had held and there was no bad smell or excessive heat.

"I'm gonna cut some more cloth and wrap it again, if that's alright with you," he said and Spock nodded, handed McCoy his knife procured from a vest pocket, and watched every move McCoy made.

"Those words," Spock said after a few moments, "'do no harm', they are Surak's words. Do you know of him?"

"Can't say I do," McCoy said.

"It is coincidence, then, that you used them."

"Not coincidence, bioethics. _Primum non nocere_ , 'first, do no harm'. All Terran doctors and healthcare personnel learn them. It's a reminder that sometimes the best thing is to do nothing when the thing you want to do might cause more harm than good. But I find it's also a good reminder when I feel my pacifist leanings begin to slip." He smiled and finished tying off the bandage and checked that it was secure, so that he was still touching Spock's leg when he looked up and found Spock watching him with the sort of soft gaze he would not have thought possible outside of unconsciousness.

"You are a pacifist, Doctor?" Spock asked, and didn't wait for a reply. "I regret to inform you that you are, in fact, in a war."

"I'm not in a war, Spock, I'm cleaning up after one," McCoy said, suddenly irritated, however doey-eyed Spock might have looked at him, and touched the bare skin of Spock's foot. "This should be good for now. Let me know if it starts bleeding again."

Spock pulled his foot away quickly and turned away, but McCoy heard the quiet, "Thank you, Doctor," before he slid into his own shelter.


	4. Day 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A dream of hell.

DAY FOUR

That day, as they slept under the sun in their little tents big enough for a man to turn over and little else, McCoy dreamed of the fire in the transport shuttle, the explosion that should have killed him but for a six inch bulkhead and luck. Only this time Jim was there, and Jo, and his father, and when they crashed it wasn't into sand and flames but an ocean of hot, boiling water, thick as mud, bubbling in through the portholes and tears in the fuselage. He tried to make it out, to reach for Jo, to save his father, but he couldn't move. No one cried out, no one could, and before it all went black he saw Jim and Jim smiled.

In the afternoon, when the sun was still high, Spock showed him how to find the prickly fruit, the tell-tale marks in the sand where they waited below the surface, how to pick off the spines without maiming himself. Then they ate without speaking, rationing water from Spock's canteen, and at dusk they packed and set off again.

In the twilight, Spock was always visible, a blacker shape against the burnt orange and purple world, just in sight, never close. The night was hotter, heavier than the one before and he thought of his hypo, the tri-ox compound that would enrich his blood with oxygen and help him breathe, but this was only the second day of walking and who knew what was to come, so he filled his chest with every breath, expanding tight against his ribcage. Overhead those two points, silver and red, watched them.

At dawn they stopped and made camp and slept and McCoy wasn't sure but he thought maybe he'd died in that fire. Maybe this was hell and not Vulcan at all. 

He should have dreamed but he did not.


	5. Day 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shelter in a cavern.

DAY FIVE

"Remain quiet and still, Doctor."

McCoy woke to that command and a hand over his mouth. Spock was next to him, blanketed under the tarpaulin and the sun still shone dimly through the cloth. He should have protested--life debt or not, there was nothing to stop the Vulcan from killing him after all--but he felt strangely soothed by the Vulcan's touch, calmed by it.

"There is a party passing by," Spock said as McCoy lay on his back, oddly listless. "We do not wish to alarm them or make them aware of our presence. The cloth will camouflage us if you will remain quiet."

Spock removed his hand and with it McCoy felt the calm drain out of him. He felt suddenly anxious, claustrophobic and too hot. The conduit tenting must have collapsed when Spock entered the shelter, and even the light tarpaulin felt too heavy, reminding him too much of the sandstorm. McCoy's heart began to race.

"Calm yourself, Doctor," Spock said, and touched his shoulder, lifted their shelter a fraction of an inch and peered out from beneath it, and McCoy was soothed by the fresh air or Spock's hand, he wasn't sure. He remembered the phrase 'Vulcan voodoo' tossed around at the Academy, but he tried not to think about it.

"Let me see," he said, moving to roll onto his belly like Spock. Spock said something in Vulcan that was probably a curse but he didn't stop him.

Outside the sun was just lowering, nearing the mountain ridge which McCoy had not been able to see the night before, and against the orange and pink line of the horizon there rode a great procession of figures, difficult to differentiate from the dunes, cloaked in the sand itself, it seemed. Many of them were mounted on giant creatures shaped like bears, which lumbered slowly over the sand with large paws, kicking up dust. Some walked, carrying staffs and bladders and smaller parcels which could have been food or could have been infants strapped across their chests. They rattled as they moved, the hollow clang of wood or bone, McCoy couldn't tell, distance and the plume of dust obscuring them. 

Beneath their shelter he and Spock lay like frightened children under blankets, watching the boogie man pass by.

"Who are they?" McCoy whispered, the sand near his face shifting with his breath.

"They are _pupak-tor_ ," Spock said, just as softly, "Lost. They are a nomadic people who have wandered for millennia. They are loyal to no one, neither reformed nor followers of the old ways, only their own, as they have ever and shall always be. Even Sybok's army does not interfere with them."

The procession continued, a long thin line leading out to the horizon as the sun fell utterly. McCoy fell asleep waiting, and by the time Spock shook him awake a few stars were already visible.

"We must cross the mountains," Spock said as they packed. "It's a narrow range but it will still require a day's walking. There will be more plant life amid the slopes, though even less atmosphere."

"Great," McCoy said.

"Is the situation really so favorable, Doctor?" Spock asked, pausing as he cached things away into his battle suit.

"No, it's a-- it's a stupid Earth thing where you say something even though you mean the opposite."

"It is a lie?"

"It's sarcasm, Spock, it's meant to be funny."

"I have found little humor in lies," Spock said, looking completely serious.

"Yeah, well in my experience there's not much in truth either, so you might as well make your own."

They headed toward the mountain range, passing over the ruts in the sand where the _pupak-tor_ had walked through, wide places in the earth where those bear paws had been. On the stonier ground at the foot of the mountains, McCoy could keep up with Spock, or Spock was allowing him, he didn't know.

"So you're rebel, then?" he asked as they picked their way up the scree, the cliffs ahead a dark shape against the night.

"Do I look like a rebel, Doctor?" Spock said without turning.

"It's just what you said about the army, it didn't sound like you were part of them."

"We are reformed, not rebels. We do not seek to revolt but to progress. The so-called Galactic Army of Light wishes to halt that progress, and indeed to revert us to their barbarous ways, or, failing that, to exterminate us."

"So we're on the same side, then?" McCoy said. "We came here to help the rebels, I mean, the reformed." He slipped on a rock and cursed, scraping his hands where the burns had just began to heal. 

A moment later Spock was there, taking him by the arm, helping him up but his voice was low and careful and his eyes dark in the starlight. "If one wished to describe a collection of all the galaxy's political interests as opposing sides of a geometric shape, that shape would necessarily be a sphere. We are no two of us on the same side, Doctor, not even, or perhaps especially not, the Federation."

McCoy jerked his arm away. They had stopped moving, standing in the rocks face to face. "What have you got against the Federation? We sent aid!"

"You sent soldiers who can't identify one green man from another. You built an outpost where none was wanted or needed, tapping into our resources like you have a hundred other planets."

"You asked for help!"

"We asked for solidarity, equanimity, not armed subjection to the will of the Federation."

"Boy have you got it wrong, pal," McCoy shouted. Spock's face was darkened with anger, but a flash of light reflected in his eyes and he looked toward it, over McCoy's shoulder out into the desert behind them. McCoy turned to face the same.

There was nothing, just the glowing line of the horizon, a few stars, the night eerily still and quiet.

"What was--" McCoy said, but a breeze gusted up to silence him. In the distance a jagged white line of lightning split the sky.

Spock shouted something in Vulcan over the clap of thunder and headed up the scree toward the cliffs.

"I don't speak Vulcan, Spock!" McCoy called after and followed, stumbling over rocks.

"Shelter!" Spock said, doubling back to take McCoy's arm roughly, pulling him along the rocks. "We must find shelter!"

It was still a long way up to the escarpment and any caves or nooks which might afford shelter, the rockfall and sand slowing their progress as the ground grew steeper. Eventually they both climbed on hands and feet as the wind moved in and the lightning grew closer. Spock reached solid ground first, turned to watch the storm cross the desert. The flashes of lightning lit his face from above, black hair and black robe blowing wildly, a terrifying dark figure set against the angry crags, purple in the night, yet when McCoy caught up to him he stretched out a hand and McCoy took it gratefully.

They scurried over the rocks, keeping their heads down and their robe or cloth over their mouths as the sand began to fly. Lightning struck ahead of them and Spock chose a different path. It struck again and they zig-zagged in the other direction. 

"Here, Doctor!" Spock said at last, only just audible over the thunder, and McCoy headed toward his voice, then the ground lit up in front of him, his shadow a black shape against it, hot searing pain down his back, a tingle all over, and nothing else.  
___

There's a place on the Ocmulgee where McCoy used to swim and when he was fifteen he met a girl there and kissed her under a cottonwood. After a rain the water would turn brown or orange from the clay and the silt would squish up between his toes and frogs would call from the treelined shore. He was on that river the morning he lay dreaming on a planet very far from home, and in it he floated on his back under a slate grey sky. It must have been late summer; he could hear a storm far off. Canada geese flew overhead, a crooked vee, honking and flapping. Behind them a starship coasted slowly over the canopy of trees, blocking out the sky, lights flashing in the dark belly of it. There was a sound like canonfire, the high keen of engines, and it began to rain.

McCoy woke to pain though he wasn't sure where, and a strange, green glow. Something touched his back. That's where the pain was. He lay on his stomach, shirtless on one of the tarpaulins. Spock shifted beside him, kneeling.

"You are awake, Doctor," he said.

"Obviously," McCoy said, just to be difficult. "What is that light?"

"Bioluminescence," Spock said. "Insects. I believe you have similar creatures on Earth, deep in the seas." This was punctuated by the soft tinkle of water as Spock rung out a cloth. 

"Where'd you get--" McCoy began to say, trying to sit up, but the pain in his back stopped him. He hissed at the sting of it and lay back down and Spock draped the wet cloth over his back, placed a hand there, too. The pain eased considerably.

"It would be wise to lie still for a while, Doctor. The water is from a spring. We are safe in a cavern deep in the mountain."

There was a rumble of thunder as if the storm wanted to object to the truth of their safety, but the sound was far off and untroubling. He could see the cave walls, covered in shimmering green lights, the ceiling too, and out behind Spock the room seemed to be large but the far wall was in darkness so that it was hard to tell.

"How long was I out?"

"Approximately zero-point-seven standard hours," Spock said. "Enough time for me to bring you here and assess your wounds."

"How bad is it?"

"Any answer would be speculative."

"Try anyway," McCoy said, and sighed. "Just describe it."

"There is a vertical burn over your right scapula measuring approximately thirty-one centimeters in length, fourteen centimeters in width, which appears to be the worst injury. Another on your right buttock, approximately nine centimeters, and between the two a general… redness."

"I thought I felt a draft," McCoy mumbled.

"Excuse me, Doctor?"

"Nothing. Did you find a small red pack when you were undressing me?"

Spock brought him his medkit and McCoy fished out the scanner. "See this? Press this, wave it over the burns, top to bottom, and hand it back to me."

The scanner hummed as Spock did as he was asked and handed it back. The display was dim, the battery nearly depleted in the intense heat but still working. Second degree on the shoulder, first degree otherwise. The lightning must not have hit him directly. Another lucky near miss for Leonard H. McCoy. As an afterthought he reached to the back of his head, hair probably singed but still there.

Spock changed the cloth again, placing it carefully. The water was warm and it stung, but the care Spock took was still soothing.

"You've got a pretty nice bedside manner, Spock," McCoy said sleepily. "You could have been a Doctor."

"I am a scientist."

"I thought you were a soldier."

"The two are not mutually exclusive," Spock said and stood, apparently satisfied that McCoy was comfortable.

McCoy was, in fact, very comfortable, his eyes heavy even though he'd just woken up. He probably shouldn't go to sleep, not after an electrical shock and a fall, but the cave was cool and the noise of the storm practically a lullaby.

He had just begun to drift when a sound entered his consciousness, of cloth on skin and the now familiar rasp of whatever sort of closure kept that battle suit tight against Spock's body. He opened one eye lazily, then the other, then picked up his head a little to get a better view, though perhaps he should not have.

In the dim, green glow, a little ways away from where McCoy lay, Spock stood naked as the last of the battle suit slid off of him and onto to the cave floor, clinging lastly to his limbs as if reluctant to leave his body. He had his back to McCoy and his neck was darker and dusty, his hair too when he shook it out, ruffling it so that dust plumed as a few of the bugs flew through the cloud to light it. He inspected himself, lifting arms and legs, turning them to see their backside, feeling at his back, buttocks and thighs, those shoulders that looked even broader out of the suit. He checked the bottoms of his feet, his ankles, and lastly he bent to remove the bandage McCoy had wrapped around his leg, bent at the waist and even in the half dark McCoy closed his eyes, certain that he shouldn't be watching this private moment. 

Behind his eyes, however, the vision persisted, taunting him, and when he heard the sound of water being poured he opened them again. Spock sat on the rocky cave floor, gathering water from the pool of the spring. He poured it over his head, his shoulders, his back, glistening in the green light as he scrubbed the sand and dust away, another canteen full for his wound, his head again, and between his legs.

The ground was beginning to get very uncomfortable, lying on his belly. McCoy shifted and that was worse. He made a sound and Spock turned to look at him, eyes somehow bright.

"Would you like to bathe, Doctor?"

McCoy groaned, turned his face away and mumbled, "Maybe later."


	6. Day 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good & Plenty

DAY SIX

McCoy woke to silence. He sat up, careful of his backside, and stood, shook out the tarpaulin and wrapped it around his waist. 

"Spock," he called softly. When there was no answer he called more loudly and it echoed off of the rock walls for a long time. He found Spock's canteen and drank all that he could hold, caught his breath and did the same again. He had no light that he could carry, just the glow of the insects, and though he could see footprints in the cave floor the bugs seemed to inhabit this cavern alone. He wasn't sure which way would lead to the cave opening and the surface, or when Spock would return. His clothes were gone and so were Spock's, which should have alarmed him but did not.

Near the spring he shed the tarpaulin, knelt by the water and tested it. It glowed green like everything else and if he hadn't seen Spock bathing in it the night before he might have assumed it would have melted his skin off. It was warm, a hot spring, and burned like fire when he poured it over his back and the burns there, but felt amazing on his head, his face, his neck and chest and all the rest of him. He scrubbed his face for a long time, scratching sand out of almost a week's worth of beard, and that's how Spock found him, kneeling naked by the pool of the spring, scratching like a dog.

"Where are my clothes?"

"Drying on rocks along with mine," Spock said, though he was covered in the black robe.

"You do laundry for all of your enemies?"

"They had an unpleasant odor, Doctor," Spock said matter-of-factly. 

McCoy shook his head, "Excuse me for having human sweat glands."

"You are excused," Spock said, but without a trace of venom. He emptied something out onto the cave floor and the cavern filled with the smell of green things and McCoy's stomach growled.

They sat on the cave floor and ate their fill, Spock in his robe and McCoy with the tarpaulin around his waist. He asked the name of several of the plants but after he couldn't pronounce most of them they ate quietly: a bright pink root vegetable that was tart and mealy, a long, slender, buttery fruit, and a pile of rough, black leaves that tasted like seaweed. 

He watched Spock throughout this, eating with the same solemnity and care as he did everything, dark hair sleek and shiny after his bath, tucked behind the soft points of his ears, the shadow of a beard only just beginning to darken his face.

"Thanks for this," McCoy said at last, when he couldn't think of any better way than to just come out and say it. "I mean, you've more than repaid any debt you think you owe me." 

Spock raised a brow but said nothing.

"You saved my life too, is what I'm saying. I'd have died at that wreckage days ago."

"That is true, Doctor."

McCoy felt his temper rise, but then Spock pushed a few of the prickly fruit toward him and he took a breath. He bit into a soft, white flower and spat it out abruptly and frowned.

"Black licorice," he said, and drank from the canteen. "Tastes like a goddamned Good & Plenty!" The curse echoed off of the cave walls.

"I surmise from your reaction that licorice is a deadly Earth poison?"

"Yeah, something like that," McCoy said, but Spock's tone was suspiciously light, and in fact, there was a smile at the corner of his mouth. "Are you laughing at me? Is that Vulcan laughter, that little smile?"

"I am not smiling, Doctor," Spock said, but he was, amusement flickering in his eyes in the green glow. McCoy felt, not for the first time, a little lost in them.

He cleared his throat and picked out another vegetable. "Look, Spock, I wanted to apologize for last night. You're right. The Federation isn't going about this the right way; using Starfleet like military… I just don't react well to conflict sometimes."

"Your apology is not necessary, though it is appreciated. I should not judge you by the actions of the Federation any more than I wish to be judged by the actions of some of my fellow Vulcans. However, I must ask, if you disagree with their methods, why are you here?"

It wasn't an accusation but it felt like one. Those were his own demons, though.

"After I, uh…" he said, "well I didn't have anywhere else to go at the time that I enlisted, and I thought we'd be explorers not military. That's what Starfleet is supposed to be, not some hammer for the Federation. Soon they were talking war and a draft and we were learning anatomy for mortal combat rather than saving lives. By that time, though, the other enlisted, they'd become friends, family, and we all just wanted to protect each other, good guys or not. Starfleet's full of people like that, who just want to do what they think is right. People like you." He smiled, but Spock did not return it.

"You should not presume to understand my motives, Doctor," he said, looking grave.

"Hey, I'm sorry, I didn't--"

"Apology accepted," Spock said, then stood smoothly. "It is nearly mid-day, our clothes will be dry soon. I suggest you seek additional rest and refreshment. We shall leave at dusk."

"Spock," McCoy called, but he was already walking into the darkness, back the way he'd come, and soon even the echo of his footsteps had faded.

McCoy couldn't sleep. He rinsed his tarpaulin in one of the springs they didn't use for drinking, slung it dripping over his shoulder and tried his luck at finding his way to the mouth of the cave, naked but for his Starfleet issue boots. It was easy to find, as it turned out. He stayed in the largest tunnel and followed the growing heat and the smell of hot sand and soon there was light ahead. The sun was intensely bright after the dim light of the cave and he had to wait in the shadows for a while for his eyes to adjust. He didn't see Spock and he wasn't going to call for him. He spread the tarpaulin out on a large rock near their clothing, anchored it with smaller rocks and tested his clothes and found them already dry.

There was a cry overhead, a bird call. He looked up and saw the huge winged shape gliding over. If it noticed him it didn't deviate from its path, and as he watched it disappear behind the crags he found another more familiar figure sitting in the shadow of an outcropping higher up, legs crossed, eyes closed, black robe catching the breeze.

McCoy watched Spock for a moment but there was no movement, no sound, and he gathered his clothes and went back into the cave. 

Spock returned before dusk, dressed again in his battle suit and boots and McCoy ate again and drank all that he could before leaving the spring behind. 

When they left the cave this time the sun was low and out ahead the land was flat and calm, all traces of the lightning storm and the passing of the _pupak-tor_ buried under the smooth surface of the sand.

They climbed further into the range, not very high but enough that the atmosphere was noticeably thinner. By the time night fell completely McCoy was sucking at the air desperately and they rested for a while and McCoy wondered just why Spock was still helping him.

Some time before dawn they scrambled down out of the rocks and into a vast lava field, undulating black and glossy beneath the stars, bright red rivers glowing not four or five meters from where they walked. Spock assured him that it was safe, but the rising gasses were nearly more than McCoy could bear so that he covered his mouth, thin air or not, and they did not rest again until the ground was soft and red beneath their feet.


	7. Day 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Attack on the city of Kir.

DAY SEVEN

At dawn they still walked, Spock far ahead of McCoy, more determined now that they must be drawing closer to the end of their shared journey, and McCoy struggled to keep up. He regretted not trying to sleep more before they left the cavern, but he would rest soon and pull his shirt off of his back where it ached in the heat, blistered by now.

As the sun crested the horizon, McCoy could see grey shapes against it, far beyond Spock's dark figure, hazy in the shimmer of it. Another mountain? No, a city, and rising from it, fat columns of smoke.

He stopped, uncertain, looked to Spock ahead but Spock was running toward him, doubling back to meet him.

"What's happening up there?" he asked when Spock reached him.

"There has been an attack," Spock said, not even out of breath after the sprint, but speaking hurriedly. "This is where we part ways, Doctor." He pointed to the horizon left of the city. "Do you see that highest peak? Keep it on your left. You will have noted the brightest stars at night, one red and one silver; keep them on your right. Camouflage yourself if you see travelers." He removed the canteen from over his shoulder and pressed it into McCoy's arms. "It is only three days if you are swift. At night, once you are near, you can see the blinking lights of the outpost's satellite towers." He made a strange gesture with his hand. "Peace and long life, Doctor Leonard McCoy."

Spock turned to leave but McCoy grabbed his arm, holding desperately, looking between Spock and the city and the mountain.

"I can help," he said at last. 

Spock pulled his arm away, gaze as fierce as phaser fire. "It would be dangerous for you there, you would not be welcome. I can no longer help you and I cannot wait for you." He turned at last and began to run.

McCoy stood, cursed, took a step and stopped, cursed again, then swung the canteen over his shoulder, cursed a third time as it scraped over his blistered back. He reached for his medkit, his hypo, pushed a dose of tri-ox compound into his outer thigh, and took off after Spock. 

Even at his best speed, with the increased oxygen enriching his system, he was no match for a Vulcan, and Spock was a dark squiggle on the horizon out ahead. One kilometer, two, three, and he was grateful for every morning Jim made him get out on the track at the Academy. Had Jim made it safely to the outpost? Had the others? Did the ship still orbit overhead? His mind raced faster than his feet, and he realized just how foggy his thoughts had been for the last week, drowning in the insufficient atmosphere. It was a good distraction, all that thinking, from the pain in his back, in his limbs, but it also made him alarmingly aware of the stupidity of his latest decision: running headfirst into the enemy.

He reached the smoke before he reached the city and he held the tarpaulin over his face, thinking once again how often that simple piece of cloth had saved his life. Through thinning patches of grey cloud he glimpsed the buildings, a strange mix of structures built from natural materials, smooth sand-colored walls formed by hand, like the pueblos in New Mexico, and tall steel and stone structures, more modern and overbearing. A wide gate and a low wall stood before him, but the gate was torn from its hinges, tilted at an odd angle so that he would have to climb over. At the top, a hand reached out for his and Spock frowned down at him, face already sooty and dark beneath the headscarf.

"You should not have come," he shouted, but helped McCoy over and into the city.

"I can help," he said again, uncertain now that it was even true.

Spock shook his head but said, "Keep the cloth over your head, particularly your ears." He tucked the tarpaulin carefully around McCoy's face and secured the ends around his neck. "Do not touch anyone unless necessary and stay close."

They made their way through the city, streets sometimes paved smooth or cobbled or sometimes hard-packed earth. Debris filled some places so that they had to climb over tumbled walls, and then turn a corner to find the homes and buildings undamaged. They encountered few people at first, only bodies that Spock checked for a pulse, until near the center of the city they began passing people on foot, some rushing away too fast to be spoken to, or shambling slowly in the same direction. Spock spoke to a few in Vulcan as they eyed McCoy suspiciously. Then he pulled McCoy aside where no one might hear the spoken Standard.

Spock explained that this was a city of neutral unreformed, so that they had no allegiance to the army, but neither did they fight against them. Many of them were elderly, clinging to the old ways out of habit.

"There was a small garrison passing through, given lodging for the night," Spock said, "rebels, as you call us, but their quarters were destroyed by a flock of fighters. The attackers destroyed the citadel along with the leaders there, then fired indiscriminately."

"Can't they call for assistance from another town?"

"Ion bombs were deployed over the city. All electrical devices will be useless without considerable time to repair them."

"Jesus," McCoy said and Spock watched him carefully, a strange look on his face. "What else aren't you telling me?"

Spock moved even closer to speak quietly. "They say the attack was by Starfleet vessels."

It took McCoy a moment to process that. Even then, he couldn't believe it. "They wouldn't… they should know this is a neutral city." He looked around, into the tired, frightened faces, familiar from news reports and Federation training holos: the dead, the dying. 

"Regardless of its truth, you are not safe here, Doctor," Spock said when McCoy said nothing else.

McCoy wiped the sweat from his forehead though there was little of it. He was becoming dehydrated. His mind felt erratic but his hands were steady. He squinted at Spock. "Where have they taken the wounded?"

The hospital had been considerably damaged. They found their way instead to the temple where the injured lay on blankets or cots on the floor. Many Vulcans were assisting them already, few of them doctors as so many had been killed in the hospital. 

McCoy knelt to the the first unattended body he found, a young woman holding her arm, blood on her tunic as she watched others pass her by. She said something to him when he approached and he hesitated, then over his shoulder came Spock's voice, gently soothing, and she let McCoy take her arm. She flinched when McCoy touched her bare skin, but Spock spoke again and she calmed, and he took out his scanner as Spock went to fetch supplies.

This didn't happen with every patient, but with many: Spock translating, hesitation when McCoy touched them, reassurance from Spock, as if they knew without even seeing his rounded ears that there was something not right about him. 

Hours passed among the noise of spoken Vulcan and the universal sound of suffering. He was sweating profusely in the still air of the temple, and the tri-ox compound had begun to wear off. He stood and drank from the canteen as Spock said words over the grey-faced body of a man they couldn't save. From somewhere behind him he heard a soft whimper. He shouldn't have heard it in that noisy place but he did.

The child hid behind a statue and when he knelt to see her better her face was wet, a green smudge across her forehead.

"Hi," he said, smiling, and she sniffed miserably. "Can I see?" He reached up to her head and she did not flinch when he touched her, but her eyes shifted to something over his shoulder.

Spock's voice was softer than ever as he knelt too, speaking to the child.

"I don't think it's her blood," McCoy said, after inspecting the mark. "Does she hurt anywhere else?"

Spock asked and she shook her head. 

"She is unable to locate her parents, Doctor."

McCoy petted her hair, lighter than Spock's, almost the color of Jo's.

"What's your name?"

"T'Shanik," she said, after Spock repeated the question.

"That's a beautiful name. I've got a little girl named Joanna. Not much older than you."

Spock was quiet for a moment, then translated and the child responded.

"She says you smell strange."

McCoy laughed, fatigue making him giddy. "Of course she did."

Spock took her by the hand and led her to one of the priests who might know her parents, and McCoy stood on tired knees, dizzy from standing too quickly.

Something tugged on his pants leg.

The elderly Vulcan sagged against the wall, both of his legs already bandaged. He spoke quickly, pleading with McCoy for something, then placed a hand over his side where McCoy knew his heart would be. McCoy looked for Spock but Spock was lost in the crowd. He knelt, feeling utterly helpless without Spock to speak for him, but he pulled out his scanner. The display flickered in and out and as he tried to will it into service the Vulcan grabbed his wrist.

A flash of pain in his mind, in his legs, and visions of a life he had never lived blocked out his view of the scanner and everything in the temple, two hundred years in the sand and the sun, fighting and lovemaking and joy and loss and then a slow descent into madness and fear, so much fear. There was a sound that he didn't recognize as his own voice calling out until Spock was there, prying the man's hand away, dragging McCoy from his side. They fell back together and through a haze McCoy watched as people approached, two dozen strange, high-browed, pointy-eared faces peering down at him. He tore at the tarpaulin, feeling like he would suffocate beneath it, and it slipped from his head before Spock could hold his arms against his sides. 

Now the faces were not curious but angry, moving closer they grabbed for him, but Spock pulled him away, out into the sun and the street, pushing through the crowds. McCoy let himself be practically carried, past broken houses and through empty alleys, and into a building, a dimly lit room filled with jars and smelling of dried herbs.

Spock sat him down on the stone tile floor, leaned him against a wall and even the pain in his back was no match for the confusion in his mind, the fear that pounded on his consciousness. His head lolled. He was so tired.

"You must not sleep now, Doctor."

"What did he do to me, Spock?"

"What he did was not in his power to control. You are aware that we are telepaths?"

"I guess I figured it out the hard way."

Spock sat beside him, held his face so that McCoy had to meet his gaze. "I need you to concentrate, Leonard. You should calm your mind. I will assist you. Please do not resist."

McCoy winced, a whimper in his voice, and felt like a child. "It's going to hurt."

"It will not if you do not resist."

"It hurt before. The day I found you."

"I regret that, Leonard. I promise this will not. Please, Doctor."

Spock's eyes were dark, pleading, and McCoy had little will to fight, but when Spock initiated contact he hesitated, the mental equivalent of a flinch.

"Place yourself somewhere restful," Spock instructed softly, "a time of security or pleasure."

McCoy closed his eyes, his mind drifting over memories that were not his own, faces he did not know. He grasped at anything familiar, even the pain in his back, the hands on his face, the calm that overcame him whenever Spock touched him, and there it was: the mountain cavern. He remembered the green bioluminescent shimmer of a million tiny insects, a thousand feet of rock between him and the burning sun, the soft touch of Spock's hands on his back, and water running over strong shoulders and dark hair, Spock's body naked by the pool of the spring, and the rumble of thunder far off.  
___

When he was next conscious he thought at first that they were still in the cavern but through a high window he could see stars and he remembered the temple.

"Are you recovered, Doctor?" Spock asked from the darkness close by.

McCoy scrubbed at this face. "I think so. I don't feel like a two hundred year old Vulcan anymore if that's what you mean."

Spock shifted closer, noisy in the dark. "It is a neurological disease. He could not help that he projected to you."

McCoy nodded. "My head's killing me."

"You should eat."

Spock laid out the last of their rations and the canteen, now refilled, and McCoy ate slowly, feeling nauseated.

He wanted to ask about the telepathy, about what Spock might have seen in his mind, but Spock was too close for that, the night too dark.

"Do you really think the Federation could have done this?" he asked instead.

"It would not be the first instance," Spock said.

"But we came to help, not to…" He made a fist but there was nothing to hit. "It had to be a mistake."

Spock was quiet for a long time but finally said. "I do not believe it an error…" he hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to speak. Finally, he said, "Doctor, the vessel that shot down your aircraft and mine, was also Starfleet craft."

McCoy sat up from against the wall, then held his head when the movement brought pain. "That's not possible," he said softly.

"It is true. The Army of Light does not possess the level of technology which destroyed my ship."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"It was irrelevant to our survival."

"It was relevant to mine!" McCoy shouted, and regretted it as his head pounded. "Anyway," he whispered, "it still could have been a mistake."

"As you say," Spock said, and touched McCoy's arm. The pain in his head subsided.

"You've been doing that all along, haven't you?" McCoy asked, leaning back against the wall. "To calm me or take the pain away?" He couldn't see Spock's face but the silence felt guilty. "Thanks," he said when it stretched. "I mean, it's kind of weird and invasive, but I guess so is stitching you up when you're unconscious, so... thanks."

"You're welcome, Doctor."

Spock still touched him, hand warm through his shirt. McCoy swallowed thickly.

"So what now?"

They were a two-day walk from the reform city, less if they found transport, a vast stronghold city built into the mountains where the reformed had lived for millennia. McCoy would be safe there, and could contact the Federation outpost. It was faster and safer than splitting up again, especially after the recent attack.

"Can't we take a shuttle from here?" McCoy asked, dreading another two days crossing the desert.

"The ion bombs will have rendered all shuttle craft inoperable, however, there is an alternative transportation option."  
__

Under the cover of darkness, with the city still in recovery or grieving, few noticed the pair of strangers moving through the streets so late at night. None heard the scrape of their feet against sandy cobblestones and if they did they had more to concern them, so it was without incident that McCoy and Spock reached the edge of town and climbed through a broken place in the wall, to the sehlat merchant whose farm sat just outside of the city 

"I still don't know about riding a sabre-toothed grizzly bear," McCoy whispered as they watched the farm from a short distance, hidden in the sparse shadow of a clump of trees. He was feeling better, or high on adrenaline, he wasn't sure. He could see the animals down in a valley behind a high stone wall, white fangs gleaming in the moonlight as fat paws clawed at the sand. Occasionally, one would growl.

"It is perfectly safe," Spock whispered back, "provided that the animal is sufficiently fed."

McCoy looked at him.

"I had one as a child. They are companion animals, controlled by telepathy. We will come to no harm."

McCoy stayed in the shadows as Spock approached the merchant's home. He had no idea what time it was or what sort of hours Vulcans kept, but the man was not welcoming when Spock called at his door. McCoy could hear their voices, the merchant's raised in anger, and then the door closed abruptly.

"What'd you do, wake him up?" McCoy asked when Spock returned.

"He was not asleep."

"What's the problem?"

"He will not sell us a mount."

McCoy shifted where he stood, irritated by the simple answer. He watched Spock in the starlight, looking strangely young and chastised. In the distance, movement caught his eye, a star shooting across the sky.

McCoy said, "Let's steal one," and stepped out of the shadows, determination or insanity pressing him on.

"Vulcans do not steal."

"Well I'm not a goddamned Vulcan."

He crossed over the sand, into the grassy plain that led to the valley. Spock kept pace but did not try to stop him.

"How will you make it over the wall?"

"You're going to help me."

"You will surely be killed, Doctor."

"Then it will be an honorable death, Spock."

It turned out that Vulcans did steal when given the choice between that and a half-mad human committing suicide, and it turned out you didn't so much ride a sehlat as just sit there and hope not to fall off. 

As they set out again to cross the desert the sky was already lightening and McCoy held tight to Spock's waist, looking behind them now and then as the giant beast loped easily over the sand but they were not followed. After a while Spock brought them to a walk and McCoy covered his head and shoulders with that life-saving cloth and the lazy roll of the sehlat's walk and the softness of Spock's robe to lean his head agaisnt made him drowsy.

"This guy gotta name?" he asked sleepily. 

"She is female. She is called Jeriba."

McCoy yawned. "Thanks for the lift, Jeri."

  
[](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/la_reverenda/12238487/4060/4060_original.jpg)  
Art by Kethavel


	8. Day 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A ride on a sehlat.

DAY EIGHT

On Joanna's first day of school, McCoy was already in the academy. He called Jocelyn early and got to see Jo's new dress and she showed him how her mother had braided her hair and then he told her to have a good day and she said that she loved him. In his dream of that day, however, Jocelyn said that Jo was not there, that she hadn't seen her in weeks, months. She thought Leonard had gone looking for her. Hadn't he found her yet? She cried on the vidscreen, called him names and asked him how? How could he have lost their daughter? The screen went black, then flickered, and across it shot a star, then another, and around him the world went black and he was falling, burning bright, racing to crash against an unknown planet, or to fall for an eternity and burn out to nothing.

A soft pattering sound woke him, thudding gently against the tarpaulin over his head, Spock's shoulders, and the rump of the sehlat. He looked up, the sky a pale beige. Rain was falling.

"Is this real?" he asked Spock, holding out his hand and then his tongue to catch it.

"It is," Spock said over his shoulder.

The rain fell harder, faster and around them the sand darkened in tiny spots, then growing patches. He laughed.

They had kept the mountain range distantly on their left flank, and at the foot of it there was movement, animals he could not recognize, large and small, coming out of caves or fissures in the rock face, and overhead one of those giant birds, all of them stepping out into the wonder of it.

Then, just as suddenly, the rain slowed and, after a few moments, stopped. 

The sehlat rambled on slowly, furk dark and damp.

McCoy gripped Spock tighter.

"Go back to sleep, Doctor."

  
[](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/la_reverenda/12238487/3838/3838_original.jpg)  
Art by Kethavel

___

They walked all day, the sehlat nearly inexhaustible, and McCoy dozed off and on. They stopped briefly to refresh and relieve themselves, then mounted again and rode on. By night they had come to a sparsely grassed plain and Spock released the sehlat to hunt her evening meal while they rested against a squat little tree and ate pieces of a flat crusty bread Spock had gotten in the city.

"Do you have a mate, Doctor?" Spock asked and McCoy almost choked.

"Shouldn't you know that? Messing around in my head?"

"We see what we must and try to see nothing more," Spock said, not really answering the question.

"I had a wife. We divorced."

"And you have a child."

"Yeah," McCoy said, fussing with the dry bread. "What about you? Have you got a mate, Spock?"

"I was bonded as a child to a female Vulcan, but she chose another."

"Tough break."

"I was not affected by her rejection."

"That's what they all say."

There was a noise in the distance, a high pitched cry and then a strangling sound.

"I think Jeri just caught her dinner," McCoy said, and Spock nearly smiled. 

"May I ask," Spock said after a while, "what caused you and your wife to part?"

McCoy scratched noisily at his beard. "We just… we weren't a good mix. It wasn't always like that, of course, but we married young. By the end we were better people apart."

"Is it common for human partners to leave one another?"

"It happens. Don't you have divorce on Vulcan?"

Spock pulled his legs up and crossed his arms over his knees and considered the stars. "There is a Vulcan ritual called kolinahr, in which one purges all emotion in favor of total logic. Few accomplish this, however, if one who achieves it is part of a bonded pair, the marriage is annulled and the other party may marry again. My mother was in fact my father's second wife for this reason."

"Tough on your dad, I guess, his wife leaving him for logic."

"He has expressed only satisfaction in her achievement. At any rate, should it not have happened, I would not have been born."

"And I'd be dead in the desert," McCoy said. He raised a piece of bread as if to toast to his own good fortune, but the motion was lost on Spock. "Will I meet them when we get to the mountain city? Your parents, I mean?"

A shuffling noise came up behind them, the drag of something soft in the grass, and the sehlat dropped down heavily a few yards away, licking dark blood from her fangs.

"My father you will meet, I am certain," Spock said, still watching the stars. "He is part of the High Command. My mother was killed some years ago during an attack by the Army of Light."

"I'm sorry," McCoy said, wanting to reach out. 

"Your sympathy is not necessary, Doctor. I have had sufficient time to recover." 

"Is that why you fight?" McCoy asked. "Vengeance?"

Spock looked away from the stars but not at McCoy, gazing distantly, speaking to the dark dunes in a practiced monotone. "Vengeance serves no purpose. The dead cannot be protected and the living do not profit by it." 

"That's a nice speech, Spock," McCoy said wryly. "Is that a quote from your prophet? Part of his 'do no harm'?"

"Surak taught forgiveness. Like you he was a pacifist."

"Does that make me more Vulcan than you?"

Spock smirked, McCoy could just see it in the starlight. "I'm afraid that would be impossible, Doctor. My duty to fight is one I bear out of necessity, as one who wishes to reap must first sow."

McCoy laughed softly. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I think there's a flaw in your logic."

"Indeed there is, as there has been for all beings at odds since the beginning of time, that peace may only be achieved through battle, but until all parties yield to logic, it will be so."

"Logic never stopped a bullet or phaser fire as far as I know. Bodies do a pretty good job of it."

Spock stood and brushed the sand from his robe, and reached out to help McCoy to his feet. 

"A graphic but accurate observation, Doctor," he said.


	9. Day 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ShiKahr.

DAY NINE

They had been watching the distant peaks grow above the horizon as they neared the mountain, blacker shapes against the stars, hazy and flat in the dawn twilight, then jutting dangerous and red as the sun rose to find their sharpest edges. The cliffs were taller than the range that they had crossed two nights before, slanting toward the sun as if to stab at its red heart, or as if they might have been thrown down from it, born of its fire.

Two hundred yards or more from the escarpment, Spock halted the sehlat and they waited. McCoy saw no opening, no pass, only rockface, ascending in what seemed like a perfect impenetrable vertical wall. Minutes passed, then a figure wavered out from the base of it, approaching quickly, a trail of red dust pluming up behind it.

When it reached them, the Vulcan rode an aircraft that could have been a motorcycle except for the missing wheels, and he was wrapped in the same black robe and headscarf that Spock wore. He and Spock exchanged words in Vulcan as he hovered beside the sehlat, then he looked to McCoy, appraising him silently, brows even higher, ears even more pointed than Spock's. He didn't sneer but something about him did. McCoy may have been a pacifist but that didn't mean some people didn't just beg to be punched in the face. 

The Vulcan spoke into a comm on his shoulder and waited. McCoy never heard a response but after a moment the rider motioned to Spock and turned his craft toward the mountain, hovering silently with little dust, moving at the pace of the Sehlat, their own personal escort.

At the foot of the mountain McCoy could still not see an entrance, and when he looked up the peaks soared so high he felt dizzy. Then their party turned sharply, parallel with the escarpment, fording through the chaparral that grew in its shadow, so close they could have reached out to touch the striated stone, until ahead there appeared as if by some trick of light an opening in the rock, wide enough for a half dozen men side-by-side, or two grown sehlats.

The path wound maze-like. Sometimes there was stone overhead, sometimes sky, and after a while they began to ascend, steep enough that McCoy and Spock leaned forward over the sehlat's back, digging in with their heels and fisting handfuls of her fur. She complained with a groan and a wet exhalation but did not stop. When the ground was level again they stood on a flat, rocky outcropping and below, stretching out as far as McCoy could see in the haze, lay a wide canyon, and in the canyon a city, rising out of the rockbed as if hewn from the stone itself. 

There was no confusion of architecture like the scorched city they'd left behind, but a seamless blend of nature and technology, of old customs and modern necessity, of pomp and practicality, a single vision, as if perhaps built all at once. Clay-colored buildings soared sharply, mimicking the crags that surrounded them, but with wide windows and delicate arches, many multi-leveled towers threatening the sky with deadly spires. In the distance, a shuttlecraft hangar sat squat and unassuming, a low, long mesa. Nearer, smaller buildings clustered in circular formations, patterns in some ancient cipher, while roads, walk paths, and bridges snaked elegantly through it all. Shuttle crafts humed overhead in the shimmer.

"It is called ShiKahr," Spock said over his shoulder as they continued to ride, now descending into the canyon by a winding path. "This is only a portion of the city. Many homes are located in the mountain itself."

"I gotta say," McCoy said, "this is not what I expected."

"Did you think us all nomads and sehlat herders, Doctor?"

"No, of course not. I know a lot of technology came out of early contact with Vulcans and you obviously have advanced weaponry, but that's all we see Earthside these days, just the war, attacks on Federation vessels. Nothing like this."

"Few outworlders have seen it. We are shielded from above." He looked up and so did McCoy, but there was nothing to see but the high peaks of the surrounding mountain and the red disc of the sun rising over them. "The entrances are protected, by nature or force."

At the bottom of the canyon they dismounted and a Vulcan in white took the sehlat, leading it away with a wave of its hand. The hovercraft rider walked McCoy and Spock down another path then into the mountain itself, too dark even with overhead lighting, so that McCoy caught the back of Spock's robe and held it, following closely until his eyes adjusted.

Soon they passed doors in the cave walls marked with cryptic symbols or perhaps written Vulcan, McCoy did not know. At last they stopped before one the doors and the rider waved a hand and it slid open. 

Five Vulcans stood inside, crowded closely together in conference, all dark figures with black or grey hair, two male, three female, and all of them intense-looking and grave. They looked up as the door opened, ten dark eyes falling heavily upon McCoy and Spock.

Spock stepped forward toward the party, members of the High Command, McCoy assumed, and spoke to the tallest, a man in a navy blue robe with symbols embroidered onto his chest. He looked like Spock, even more than all the rest of them looked like Spock, austere and imposing and impeccable, so that Spock looked shabby next to him, dusty and weathered, scarf down around his neck and his robe frayed at the hem. McCoy looked down at himself, keenly aware that he would look even worse, uniform torn, burned, and stained, beard nine days out. He probably smelled. He remembered suddenly that he was still wearing the tarpaulin and pulled it down off of his head.

As the talking continued, McCoy caught his own name amid the Vulcan and Spock turned and gestured toward him. The council members turned to him as well, curious, as if he'd only just entered the room, below their notice before being named.

"Leonard McCoy," Spock said, "this is my father, Sarek, of the Vulcan High Command."

Before McCoy could speak, Spock's father said in Standard, "My son tells me you are a Starfleet doctor."

McCoy shifted from one foot to the other under that gaze, feeling like a boy in grade school. "Yes sir, well, surgeon. Technically." He cleared his throat.

Sarek appraised him for a long moment, then spoke to Spock, then again to McCoy.

"You will rest now. I know that you must be as eager as we are to understand all that has happened, however, your journey has been long and you require medical attention."

"I'm fine, really," McCoy said, but Sarek continued.

"There will be a council meeting in five standard hours. Until then, you should not think us hostile if we post a guard outside your door."

McCoy waited, then said, "Um, thank you," and then another Vulcan in white appeared silently at his side and the members returned to their previous quiet conference.

Spock stepped closer, speaking quietly. "You are not a prisoner, however, the Command is cautious. T'Saan will guide you," he gestured to the guard in white, then moved to turn away.

"Hey, wait, you're not leaving me alone," McCoy whispered angrily as he grabbed Spock's arm. Some of the Command members glanced their way and McCoy could swear that Spock was blushing under the desert dust that coated his face. "Sorry," he whispered more softly, and released Spock's arm.

"Have I yet abandoned you, Doctor?" Spock asked evenly, dark eyes challenging in spite of the greenish flush rising in his cheeks.

"Alright, I know, just…" McCoy sighed. "Don't forget about me."

T'Saan led him out of the room and through the same corridors, twisting through the mountain until McCoy thought there was really no point to posting a guard; he'd never find his way out of this maze alone. 

She led him at last to a bright room with a bed and a washroom and a carafe on a low table, all plain and utilitarian, but luxurious in comparison to the hot sand and a makeshift tent. 

"Once you are refreshed," T'Saan said at last in heavily accented Standard, "I shall take you to medical." 

He thanked her but she did not respond, only stepped out of the room and the doors snicked closed behind her and McCoy stood there in the quiet coolness and the sudden oddity of being so alone.

He shed the tarpaulin, his clothes, his boots, all in a pile of sand and dust and stood naked drinking heavily from the carafe of water. In the washroom he found a tall mirror of hazy glass and there he saw a man he barely recognized, face dark with dirt and exposure, hands and ankles too, and around his waist and chest and neck and groin and in every crevice a layer of grime. His beard was filling in, his eyes were red. That at least was familiar. Too close to how he'd looked after the divorce, before Starfleet had changed his life.

There was no shower but a low basin with a drain in the center and an ornamental dish which he filled with water. He scooped from this with a wide bowl and sat and poured it over his head the way that Spock had at the cave spring. The water had a chemical tang when he tasted it, obviously recycled, and it drained away brown and thick as he rinsed, foaming when he found a powdered soap that smelled like lavender, scrubbing out his hair and beard, careful of the raw skin on his back.

He did not shave as he found no razor or other implement, but there was a robe on the bed and a simple black tunic and pants. He slipped on the pants and lay on the bed. It was not soft and neither were the bed coverings, but after so long on the ground it felt incredibly plush and cool, astonishingly quiet in the mountain's heart, and even as he fell asleep he could still feel the sway of the sehlat beneath him, Spock's back against his chest.  
___

McCoy dreamed of the Academy, of Jim. Jim who was always smiling even when he didn't mean it, whose smile helped pull McCoy out of a hopeless depression and back into life. In his dream he and Jim stood in the flight simulator, their instructors watching from glass-walled rooms above, except the simulator was not the deck of a starship but the room that they shared, and in the half-dark McCoy lay on a bunk and Jim sat next to him with eyes too soft, too dark. A hand touched his and when McCoy looked up again Spock sat on the edge of the bed instead. He spoke but they were words without sound or meaning, until the dream shifted and Spock lay next to him, skin pale-green and warm against McCoy's, mouth hot and wet and soft, so unbearably soft, but when McCoy rolled over to press him into the bed he found that he was alone, and overhead the instructors looked down, faces dark and obscured, cloaked in rust-red cloth that transmuted slowly into sand to bank against the clear walls, rising like an hourglass, until it cracked.

"Doctor?"

Spock did not sit on the bed but he stood next to it when McCoy woke. McCoy didn't know how long he'd slept but Spock was changed, clean and dressed in a tunic and pants similar to the ones left for McCoy, a small symbol over his left breast, and smelled faintly of something like sandalwood when McCoy stood next to him.

McCoy dressed and re-wet and combed his hair which had dried messily, and Spock walked him to a medical center, T'Saan trailing some distance behind, then waited as two doctors spoke in Vulcan over McCoy's shoulder.

"Do they know how to calibrate the regenerator to my tissue?" he asked Spock.

"You are not their first human patient," Spock said.

Afterward, they took a meal in Spock's quarters, the first hot food either of them had eaten in almost ten days, a warm stew with what McCoy would swear were sweet potatoes, and more of that dry bread. McCoy asked if the High Command would send aid to Kir, the neutral city.

"A transport has been sent with medical personnel and supplies," Spock said. "It is likely that it has already arrived."

"Do they know anything else? Anything about what's going on with Starfleet?"

Spock poured an orange-colored tea into two cups. "What they know they will share at the meeting. You will be asked to give a statement as will I."

"And then I can contact the outpost?" McCoy asked. Now that he was not simply trying to keep himself alive, his mind was occupied with Starfleet, with warning Jim of whatever was going on, and letting him know that he was still alive.

"I am uncertain."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that any statement I make concerning the decisions of the Command are merely conjecture."

McCoy sat forward, irritated. "I don't know if you understand this, but I've got friends at that outpost and their lives may be in danger. Something isn't right and I've got a feeling it's not just going to affect Vulcans."

Spock was beginning to show irritation as well, though he hid it better. "Perhaps, Doctor, there was a reason your craft was shot down and alerting Starfleet to your status as a living witness to their betrayal would put yourself and this city in danger."

McCoy reached out, touched Spock's arm as he pleaded his case. "If I can just contact Captain Pike, or even my friend, Jim. He's first officer and he was supposed to arrive ahead of me. He'll know what's going on or he'll help us find out."

"That is a suggestion which you should bring up to Command," Spock said.

"I'm bringing it up to you!"

"There is no need to shout, Doctor."

McCoy sat back, drew his hand away. "We came all this way and now you're just going to sit there and tell me not to shout, not to worry about my friends? I can't sit back while a bunch of old Vulcans try to figure out the logical thing to do."

"I am merely suggesting that you wait a while longer," Spock said, his voice calm but color was rising at his collar. "You once said that logic does not stop phaser fire, neither will rash emotionalism."

"This is pointless," McCoy said and stood, tired of trying to reason. He looked around Spock's quarters. "Don't you have a comm station somewhere?" 

"Doctor, please be seated."

McCoy crossed the room, cursing. "I'll show you rash emotionalism," he said as he searched desktops and wall space and shelving, even the washroom, for any hidden vid comms, but the room was almost as austere as his own, a few ornamental or religious figures, small devices which may have had some personal use which McCoy did not recognize as he shuffled them around on a tabletop noisily. In one corner, quite out of place, a stringed instrument.

"Leonard."

He ignored Spock, mumbled about cold-blooded, inhuman Vulcans and crossed to another, smaller room which contained a bed and a desk or wardrobe. He began opening drawers, black stacks of robes and undergarments that suddenly made him feel ashamed for his outburst and invading Spock's privacy, but peaking out from beneath some of these he caught movement, a soft glow. He thought it could have been a vid comm and he pulled it out. Behind him he could hear Spock approaching. He should have put it down then, hidden it back away, but he did not.

The screen was not a vid comm. It was a holo. In it a woman held a baby with soft-pointed ears, a flush in its cheeks as it cried. She smiled tiredly, looking up and out to the person on the other side of the holo recorder, face red and sweating. It looped like that, over and over as McCoy held it, his anger draining.

"My mother," Spock said quietly from over McCoy's shoulder, then took the holo from McCoy and watched it for a moment.

"She was human," McCoy said.

Spock nodded. "My father was ambassador to Earth before the Army of Light began attacking Federation vessels and all diplomats returned home. She returned with him. Some called my father a traitor." He looked at McCoy, eyes soft and brown and suddenly so human.

"I'm sorry," McCoy said. "I shouldn't have said those things about you being, you know, coldblooded or..."

"In many ways you remind me of her," Spock said, dismissing McCoy's apology. "She had the same passion, though it presented in more productive ways."

McCoy breathed a laugh but Spock's gaze was serious in the low light of the room, the soft glow of the holo, his cheeks and the top of his nose sunburned a peculiar pink, a reminder of their journey together.

"You asked me if I fought for vengeance," Spock said. "Sometimes I think that I do. I know that it is not logical, and yet I let it guide me at times that I am uncertain of all else."

"That sounds very human, Spock," McCoy said, and smiled, trying to coax a smile from Spock as well, but Spock only watched him silently with those dark eyes, standing close, the smell of him, sandalwood and earthy tea, lingering between them, until McCoy leaned forward and pressed his lips against Spock's.

It was a soft kiss, gentle and short and undemanding, but his heart skipped, surprised at his own boldness, and the memory of the dream.

He stood back, tasting orange tea, and Spock watched him, something unreadable in his eyes. They flickered to McCoy's lips and McCoy leaned forward again. 

Spock stepped back suddenly. When he spoke his face and tone were neutral. 

"The High Command will be convening in one hour," he said. "We should prepare." He stepped farther from McCoy, moving back into the other room as McCoy followed.

"Spock..."

"You may wish to spend the meantime in your quarters," Spock said as he led McCoy to the door. It slid open abruptly. On the other side T'Saan stood, watching him expectantly. 

McCoy hesitated, standing in front of Spock, wanting to say more but not with an audience.

"Yeah," he said at last, and crossed the threshold. 

The door slid shut and he stood in the hallway staring at it. He shrugged at T'Saan but she only watched him. After a moment she said, "Should you wish to remove your facial hair, I shall instruct you on how to use the personal groomer."  
___

The Vulcan High Command met in one of the skyscrapers in the center of ShiKahr, a round room with black walls that gleamed like obsidian, on one side a semi-circle table with six chairs and across from it an arc of stadium seating without tabletop or chair, filled with serious looking Vulcans in black or brown or dark blue robes. McCoy was seated to the side of this, in a little gallery alongside a half dozen others, including Spock, and in between them a Vulcan in a shiny red gown, who more than once frowned at McCoy when he tried to get Spock's attention in the noisy room. In the very center of the room, a small, empty, round platform.

A drum sounded, one solemn thud from somewhere McCoy could not see, and the room quieted as a procession of robed figures entered to the tinny sound of brass chimes. The five members McCoy had met that morning marched in first, and then another, smaller woman who carried a scepter taller than she, and they all sat at the semi-circle table, each preceded by another drum strike and their titles announced in Vulcan which McCoy heard in Standard through the earpiece he had been given. Then each of the individuals in the gallery were in turn led forward to the platform in the center of the room to give their testimony.

The Vulcan in the red gown was from the city on the fire plains. They had been attacked one week before by unidentified but highly advanced fighter craft. Another, dressed in a grey-white robe with a woven rope belt and sandals, like some biblical sheep herder, said that the village in the grass hills had burned to the ground, the hem of his robe, now that McCoy was really looking, scorched black. As Spock stood on the platform he spoke of the dogfight he'd had with what he believed to be a Starfleet vessel, seeing it attack McCoy's transport shuttle, of the city of Kir, attacked in the night, but nothing about saving McCoy's life or stealing a sehlat, and certainly nothing about being kissed by some fool human. 

When it was McCoy's turn he stood and followed T'Saan, still his constant companion, down to the platform, where he was handed a small device to speak into.

"Leonard H. McCoy," he said, identifying himself as the others had. "Human. Terran. Starfleet surgeon from the USS Enterprise, serving under Captain Pike."

A drumbeat.

"Speak thy testimony, Leonard H. McCoy," said the woman with the scepter who had been called T'Pau.

"Well, um," he looked around the room, too much like an Academy lecture hall. He wiped sweaty palms on the black robe he wore, glad at least to have taken T'Saan's suggestion about the beard. He looked at Spock. Spock inclined his head curiously. McCoy spoke again.

"I was in a Starfleet transport shuttle on the way to the Federation outpost with medical supplies when we got shot down. Mr. Spock was kind enough not to shoot me," he laughed softly but no one else joined him. He cleared his throat. "I don't know if what he says is true, about it being Starfleet vessels that attacked my ship and Kir, but everything else in his account is how it happened, and if the Federation did do this, I have to assume it was a gross error. There's no reason for them to attack their own vessel, or even the neutral city. We came to help the rebels, I mean… to help _you_ , against the Army of Light."

There was a general low murmur throughout the room, too jumbled and quiet to translate. Another drumbeat sounded. T'Saan motioned for him to leave the platform.

"Wait," he said, and stepped toward the High Command. "I request that I be allowed to contact the Federation outpost, or to go there. You say I'm not a prisoner so prove it to me. This can be resolved but not by sitting around beating drums over it."

The room was silent, incredibly so. None of the council members spoke. T'Saan said his name and made another motion and he followed her back to his seat under the heavy eyes of the entire room.

Another drumbeat and this time Spock's father, Sarek, took the platform. The deep black of his robe bled into the obsidian walls and his pale face stood stark against it and grave.

"The human is wrong," he said, "though I believe it is in good faith that he defends his people, as we have our own, for so long." 

He spoke of the Army of Light, whose numbers, he said, were dwindling, whose threat, after so many millennia, was waning, as many followers had strayed from their violent history to the path of logic and joined them at ShiKahr or other reform cities. He then spoke of the Federation, of how that intergalactic group, once ignorant or disinterested in their struggles, had at last answered their call for amity and aid only to bring violence and bloodshed. He gave an account of their contact with Admiral Marcus, a name McCoy knew well by reputation, who had traveled to Vulcan with reinforcements. For months the Admiral had made vague promises to find and arrest Sybok, the army leader, and other such speeches to pacify the High Command, until the the day that McCoy and Spock had been shot down. On that day communications between ShiKahr and the Federation outpost had been cut, seemingly by the Federation. 

Sarek spoke at last of the greatness of Vulcan, of its people, of a war long fought and nearly won, and how the Federation, on whom they had called for goodwill and assistance, may now have brought a new war to the red shores of their world.  
___

Night was falling as the meeting ended and all in attendance funneled out to spread thin amid the brown cobblestones of a courtyard, likely discussing the council's decision, as many of them threw glances McCoy's way, their blank expressions unreadable. He waited outside for Spock who was speaking with his father, feeling too warm in the robe T'Saan had suggested he wear. She stood next to him even then, arms crossed behind her back. She had also suggested, rather sternly, that he not interrupt Spock's conversation with his father.

McCoy looked up, the sky a reddish purple, the stars not yet visible save for those silver and red eyes that watched him always. Somewhere out there a starship orbited, the USS Enterprise, out of which he had shuttled nine days before, and four days before that he had warped out of the Sol System the day after shuttling off from Earth where, that morning, he'd kissed his daughter's cheek and promised to be back as soon as he could and taken BART to the bay. 

Two weeks later he was standing on a distant planet surrounded by aliens fighting an alien war and tomorrow, by the benevolent will of the High Command, he would be setting out for the Federation outpost to see if his friends were alive, if his superiors had gone mad, and if, as it was beginning to look, he was suddenly on the wrong side.

"I am coming with you," Spock said when McCoy looked down to find him standing there.

"You definitely are not."

Spock stepped past him, headed toward the mountain corridors at a fast clip. McCoy hurried to catch up, T'Saan in tow.

"I am. We leave at dawn. On the hoverspeeder we should arrive in approximately five standard hours."

"The council said I was going alone," McCoy said to his retreating back.

"The council have changed their minds."

"You mean you played the 'my daddy is a big shot' card and _made_ them change their minds."

"There was no playing of cards, however, I did ask my father to intervene."

"That's what I just said. Hey, would you stop?" McCoy reached out and turned Spock by the shoulder, then balked at Spock's face, the deadly determination in it. He persisted in spite of it. "It's too dangerous for you. I don't know why but suddenly all Vulcans are Federation enemy number one and I don't know if you've noticed your pointy ears lately but that means you. Hell, if they're shooting down their own craft, I may not even be safe."

"Precisely why I am coming with you," Spock said, eyes bright with anger. "You do not know the way across the Forge. Should you be captured or your speeder disabled you will not only be lost, but ShiKahr will be in the same position, not knowing the intentions of the Federation. I am to deliver you safely and, if possible, speak to Admiral Marcus."

"That is an even worse idea. I thought Vulcans were intelligent."

"It is the logical action."

"Logically, you could get killed. I won't let you get hurt because of me."

"And I will not let you be hurt," Spock said. Stepping closer, he reached out and took McCoy's hand, barely, just a warm palm over his knuckles and brush of fingertips against his palm, but it lingered. A dusty breeze came through, their robes billowing out together in the wine-colored light. Then Spock released him and turned and left.

T'Saan stared, one eyebrow raised even higher than usual.

"What are you looking at?" McCoy said.  
___

Alone in his quarters, eleven hours before dawn, McCoy sat on his bed and scrubbed tiredly at his face with his hand and tried to think of saving Jim and stopping Admiral Marcus but thought instead of a hand in his and lips on his and how they had been as soft in real life as they had been in the dream.

A chime sounded and he spoke the Vulcan phrase which would open the door to his room. Sarek entered. 

McCoy stood and bowed, though he wasn't sure if that's what he was supposed to do, and said simply, "hi."

Sarek, to McCoy's surprise, gave a small smile.

"Please be comfortable, Doctor McCoy, I did not come to make you otherwise, nor in an official capacity."

McCoy shifted where he stood and waited.

"It has been long since I was in the presence of humans."

"Well Vulcans are still pretty new to me, so."

"Our ways and manners are easier for some than others."

"You mean like Spock's mother?" McCoy asked out of spite, and regretted it immediately.

"Spock spoke to you of his mother?"

"Is that surprising?"

Sarek inclined his head but did not answer the question. "It is because of her that I am here. Were she alive I have no doubt she would have sent me, and I find that I am unable to deny her even now."

McCoy sat on the bed. It might have been disrespectful but if the Vulcan was going to talk in circles it was going to make him dizzy.

"You and my son have bonded," Sarek said suddenly. 

"Are we talking camaraderie or something else?"

"You are not aware of it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," McCoy said, rubbing at his forehead.

Sarek sat next to him, not close but too close for that serious dark gaze and a scent like sandalwood that matched Spock's.

"You are aware of the Vulcan philosophy of logic, of suppressing all emotion?"

"I know a little by now."

"When I was young I felt that I had mastered the practice. Even through marriage and the eventual loss of my first wife I congratulated myself on my lack of feeling, my impassiveness. Until I met a human woman, who proved to me that I was wrong. It was not until Amanda that I learned the true nature of emotional suppression."

"She must have loved that."

"She was understanding of our customs. Indeed she understood better than I that it is not merely the lack of emotion that opens one's mind to logic, but the acceptance and assimilation of it, allowing it to inform us as much as any other sense, for anything other would be ignorance."

"No courage without fear is what you're saying?"

"Indeed. To act logically under the influence of emotion is true logic."

McCoy sighed. "Is this some kind of pep talk?"

Sarek smiled again, barely there. "I tell you this because I believe you may be that influence for my son."

The room was quiet and cool but for the thrum of forced air. McCoy rubbed his hands together, dry and noisy.

"What am I supposed to do with that?" he asked.

Sarek stood. "It is not my place to advise in this situation, merely to observe and inform. My wife, were she here, may have said otherwise."

McCoy stood next to him and said dryly, "That's really helpful, thanks."

When Sarek left, McCoy lowered the lights and lay down. He thought that he would dream of the desert, of Jim smiling or dead, of the Enterprise overhead or crashing down, of Spock injured or pressed warm against him, of fires burning down clay-colored houses on blood-red sand, or his daughter asking why he had never come home, but as he lay in the dark and the cool and the quiet, exhausted, he slipped off to sleep and dreamed of nothing at all.


	10. Day 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ruins and Tunnels

DAY TEN

Before dawn, T'Saan woke McCoy bearing a black battle suit like the one Spock had worn on their journey across the desert. He dressed in it, the woven fabric clingy but breathable, and ate a breakfast of fruits and some kind of porridge and she stared at him blankly when he asked if there was coffee.

The night was darker in the shadows of the surrounding mountain and the tall buildings as he was shuttled from the mountain corridor out to the hangar. Spock was there, dressed in a matching battlesuit and boots, loading a hoverspeeder with provisions, mostly water but also some food and tarpaulins and medical supplies, and two of the phaser-like weapons. They would take only one speeder, since Spock would be returning alone if he survived and if he wasn't taken as prisoner.

"You trust me with this?" McCoy asked of the phaser. Spock looked up, face pale in the dim hangar lights, but did not reply. 

As the sky began to lighten they walked out onto a runway where a group of Vulcans had gathered, including Spock's father and the rest of the High Command. Drums were beaten and bells were shook and a wrinkled and grey-haired Vulcan daubed them on the forehead with a citrus-y smelling oil, first Spock then McCoy, and then Sarek raised his hand in that same gesture Spock had used in the desert and said a few words to Spock then to McCoy. Spock returned the gesture and McCoy tried but failed and waved awkwardly.

They mounted the speeder, McCoy uncertain now if he should hold onto Spock or the frame, but there was no place to hold and he gripped Spock loosely, self-conscious with the crowd watching him, thighs still sore from riding the sehlat. The sun crested bright and red over the rim of the mountains and Spock took the speeder out slowly across runway, accelerating as it dropped off onto the hard-packed earth. It bucked and McCoy held him tighter.

They rode without speaking, along the floor of the canyon, the earth blurring red beneath them, passing dry shrubs and squat trees left and right, the city shrinking behind them. The sun rose higher and McCoy wrapped a black scarf tightly over his head and neck. It caught in the wind but he held it with one hand and one hand on Spock. Along their way they passed small herds of grasseaters grazing on purple flowers that grew on the rocks, long-legged reptiles that climbed the cliffs with terrifying ease and who paused to turn and watch them go by. They passed also places in the stones that vented white gas and gave a deadly smell. 

For hours they followed that path, the hum of the wind and the speeder loud in their ears, the thrum of it buzzing in their teeth, their bones, until Spock turned toward a saddle in the ridge and a worn path that led the way out and up onto a sparsely grassed plain, climbing up from the edge of the world. This land was flat and even and they passed travelers in hovercars or long, trundling vehicles that still rolled on the sand and McCoy caught their faces, watching the pair of them as they sped past.

He began to feel uneasy, not, as he should have, because of the dangers they were facing, but because after that day, in just a few hours, he was likely to never see Spock again, loyalties or galaxies or perhaps even death between them. He had stopped feeling self-conscious about holding onto Spock somewhere in the canyon, and now he hugged tightly, and when the dust would rise he'd rest his cheek against Spock's shoulder and breathe in the smell of him.

In another hour they stopped at a red and crumbling structure that must have once been a place of worship, empty now but for a few small creatures flying in and out of the high vaulted ceiling, scurrying in dusty corners. Spock drove the speeder through the wide place where the door might have been, into the broken shadows. The speeder stopped and went silent.

They sat for a moment, McCoy still holding on, body still buzzing from the long ride, but he stood at last and stretched and walked to an open place in the wall where he looked out. In the distance, he could see a village in the shimmer, white as gypsum against the far off dunes, but they had not seen anyone for a long time.

"What is this place?" he asked when Spock offered him the canteen.

"It was a great temple, like the one in Kir. Ceremonies were performed here."

"Weddings or funerals?"

"Both," Spock said, "of a sort. It was built before the reform. Many battles were fought in the names of the gods served here. Many Vulcans bled and died for them."

McCoy nodded and turned away from the brightness outside to lean against the unbroken part of the wall, his eyes still adjusting to the dim. 

"Sounds like human history," McCoy said.

"The history of many cultures, even the most civilized and advanced."

"But you still have all of these rituals. They come from before that, don't they? Before the reform?"

"Many, yes. They serve as reminders. We were a violent race, as the Army of Light is still, but we were strong. Even now, young Vulcans must complete a rite of passage to prove their courage. Peace without strength is merely a consequence."

McCoy breathed a laugh. "You sound like your dad."

Spock did not reply but inclined his head in agreement and stood quietly, close, still watching McCoy. The wind whistled through the cracks in the walls, the hollowed out windows and doors, over the dome where the sun shone partly through.

"Spock," McCoy said, and shifted his feet. "Yesterday, in your room, I know I shouldn't have-- well I didn't do that right. The kiss. I mean I probably shouldn't have but I had wanted to since the cavern."

"I know that, Leonard," Spock said softly.

"Yeah, I guess you would." He looked down then up again. "I didn't want you to think it was some xenophobic knee jerk thing to finding out you were human." 

Spock stepped closer, his face lit from below by the red glow of the sun on the sand outside, by a patchwork of dapples through the broken roof above.

"I am Vulcan," he said, voice so low that McCoy's heart pounded from it, "and I am also human."

McCoy swallowed thickly, raised one hand toward Spock then lowered it. "If I wanted to express attraction toward a Vulcan, what would I do?"

Spock raised a brow but did not back away. "Courtship rituals commonly last many years. Families are consulted. Terms are discussed." 

"What if I don't have that much time?"

"Then perhaps, as you do not possess telepathic gifts, the wisest course is to express your attraction verbally."

"And what if, no matter what I say, it's illogical because there is no time."

"Then, logically," Spock said as he took another step closer," you should make use of the time that you have."

McCoy shifted, hands fisting at his sides, uncertain. Spock watched him, dark eyes nearly black, lips parted.

"Show me…" McCoy whispered at last, breathless. "I just want to touch you, if you want me to."

There was a flap of leathery wings as a bird flew off from somewhere above and they both looked up to watch. When McCoy looked down again Spock held up one hand in a now familiar gesture.

"Are you saying goodbye to me?" McCoy asked.

Spock smiled. "The ta'al has many meanings,' he said, and took McCoy's hand and pressed their palms together. McCoy tried again and failed to mimic it, but there was something electric in the touch anyway. After a moment he apologized and laughed and Spock's smile faded, then Spock closed his hand over McCoys and leaned forward and kissed him.

It was as soft and easy at first as the one that McCoy had given him the day before until McCoy squeezed Spock's hand in his and pulled him closer behind the neck and parted his lips. Spock made a small sound and McCoy was suddenly pressed against the wall, against Spock. Sand shifted noisily beneath their boots as Spock tried to get purchase, the weight of him against McCoy's chest. He would have complained that it was hard to breathe but he would have gladly died that way.

They parted briefly, just far enough for Spock to look at him, his brow furrowed like McCoy was something he was only just beginning to understand, lips pressure-red in spite of his green blood. McCoy smiled. They no longer held hands and McCoy touched Spock's face, kissed him gently on the corner of his mouth, waiting for him to work through whatever was going on between those pointed ears. He leaned forward and kissed those too, nipped at the lobes, down Spock's neck where he smelled of incense and hot skin, until Spock moved at last, hands on McCoy's back, down to his waist, around his buttocks and then Spock knelt slightly, pushed McCoy back against the wall and lifted, so that when McCoy's laughter echoed off of the crumbling red walls he had a Vulcan between his thighs, his feet off of the ground.

"God, you feel good," McCoy said as Spock pressed against him, kissing him again, demanding something more, and Spock said nothing with words and everything with his lips, his hips, his hands. 

They stayed like that for a little while, petting and aching, until Spock said, "There is a ritual."

McCoy said, "Of course there is."

They parted and undressed and spread one of the canvas tarpaulins over the red and dusty floor and sat facing one another, knees raised, legs brushing each other's sides. In one of the enclosures in his suit, Spock had carried a vial of oil, citrus-smelling, like the one that the old Vulcan had blessed them with, and he poured some of this into his palm and smeared it over McCoy's chest and then his own, hand sliding down to where his heart beat wildly when McCoy touched him there. He said some words in Vulcan and then in Standard he said, "Parted from me and never parted. Never and always touching and touched."

"Did you just marry me, Spock?" McCoy asked without real concern.

"It is a link. So that we may go together wherever we go apart."

With slick fragrant fingers Spock touched his face and McCoy nodded that it was okay. He closed his eyes and in his mind he did not have to go anywhere safe or pleasurable because he was already there. He felt Spock's lips on his even as he felt the link in the back of his head, like a hand cradling him there, though one of Spock's was on his face and the other was on his sex and he made a sound at the pleasure of both. 

When they parted again each stroked the other and McCoy opened his eyes and nothing was different but everything seemed to be, warmer, redder, clearer.

"Will you have me, Leonard?" Spock said and McCoy sighed and said yes, anything, yes.

Spock pushed him to lie back and straddled his hips, sitting up on his knees. With more of the oil he reached behind himself and stared down, always staring down at McCoy with those dark eyes and mouth panting, even as he grasped McCoy with slippery fingers and seated himself, sinking down to the sound of McCoy sighing. He moved, slowly at first but soon quickly, hands on McCoy's chest to brace himself and McCoy met him halfway, pushing up, until it wasn't enough and he didn't even speak or nudge and Spock rolled them over, pulled McCoy with him to fit between his thighs, to wrap his legs around McCoy as they rocked together in long thrusts timed with desperate sounds and the slide of the tarpaulin over the dusty floor. 

When they lay together catching their breath, McCoy sweating, before untangling their bodies and their minds, McCoy buried his face in Spock's throat, nudging at his jaw, and kissed him there lazily.

"I don't want to leave you here," he whispered.

"You will not," Spock said and it felt like a prediction.

Soon the sun overhead rose high enough to be seen through the break in the ceiling and it shone down on them like a reminder of the day, their mission.

With the last of the oil, Spock dampened a cloth and each cleaned the other, the oil drying soft and sweet-smelling on their skin. They dressed slowly, delaying what they could until a hot breeze blew strong through the temple and they knew that they could delay no more.

McCoy could still feel the link in his mind, not like a physical sensation now, but like something remembered which he had once forgotten. It reassured him in spite of the day ahead, the peculiar sense he had of Spock, not knowing his thoughts or seeing through his eyes, but an effortless understanding, like the placement of his own limbs. He felt this as Spock dressed and re-packed the tarpaulin and canteen, he felt it when Spock watched McCoy when McCoy was not looking, and he felt it when Spock stood at the door of the temple and looked out to see if the way was clear.

"What's wrong?" McCoy asked, stomach falling at the rush of alarm that came over him. He joined Spock in the open doorway.

Out across the horizon plumes of dust flew up in a long line, shimmering in the haze. McCoy could see no more than that but Spock could.

"Army of Light," he said. "They will be here in minutes."

"So we run for it?"

"They would pursue us. My brother is with them. He will know that I am here and we will not outrun them."

"Your brother?"

"Time does not permit explanation."

"Then why are we standing here? We fight, right? I may be a pacifist but I'm not an idiot."

Spock looked at him, placed a hand on his shoulder, too calm. "We do not, Leonard," he said, and McCoy felt pressure on his neck, pain, and then the temple and the sand and Spock all went black.  
___

He did not know if he dreamed. He thought that he did. In what he thought was a dream he was still in the temple, lying on a bed of red rubble and Spock rode out on the speeder without him. There was a flash like phaser fire but not like it and the speeder shuddered and skidded and Spock rolled off and climbed to his feet. Men in white robes approached but Spock had lost his phaser and the men laughed as if it were sport to watch him brace for the fight, but neither laughed when he broke their necks with his hands and a sickening twisting sound. Then others came, a cloud of white and dust and one black figure fighting in the center of it and on his bed of rocks McCoy could hear a song and the sea.

_When I get off of this mountain, I know where I'm gonna go; straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico_

"Bones!"

The name, his nickname, which only Jim called him, came from Jim. The noise of the sea came through a dimly lit window behind him.

"Who's singing?" McCoy asked.

"You were," Jim said, "sort of. Jesus, buddy, we thought you were dead."

McCoy blinked in the odd blue lighting. Jim began to slide into focus, all sunpink cheeks and blue eyes, standing close by. "Dead men don't sing. Where the hell am I?"

"You're at the medical center at the outpost. A ground sweep found you in the ruins, hidden under some debris. They saw some activity and went to check it out but there was nothing but you."

"Spock!" McCoy said, memory flooding back. He sat up too fast. 

"Take it easy," Jim said, and pushed McCoy back down onto the med table, another motion which made him even more dizzy.

"I've got to find Spock."

"What's a spock? Whatever it is it can wait, you've been dead for ten days, take a breather."

McCoy sat up again more slowly, clutching at his aching head. Jim didn't try to stop him.

"Spock's a person, a Vulcan. Get me a hypo, would you? And bicaridine. He brought me through the desert, and he's the one who knocked me out and hid me in the church."

Jim brought the hypo and the drug and McCoy pushed the painkiller into his thigh.

"And you want to find him?" Jim asked.

"He saved my life, Jim, more than once. The army guys, his brother, they must have taken him, he's not dead, I can feel it." When he looked up Jim was blinking at him, confused. He looked older than the last time McCoy had seen him on the Enterprise, less than two weeks ago.

"You're not making sense, Bones."

McCoy tried to stand but Jim pushed him back quickly so that his stomach lurched.

"Just wait a minute, alright!" 

"I told you, Jim, I've got to go."

"No, you can't," Jim said, a hoarse whisper that wanted to be a shout, face flushed, eyes wild for a fight. The room was cold compared to days in the desert and that look on Jim's face was like a shock. 

"That's what I've been trying to tell you," Jim continued. "Ten days ago you disappear and all we've got is a burnt out shuttle. We thought you were dead. _Starfleet_ thinks you're dead. Admiral Marcus signed a report that they'd found your body and had a funeral for you and the shuttle crew, flags and brass and all. They aired it Earthside." He stopped and breathed and waited, and it was what Jim didn't say that struck McCoy.

"Oh god," he said, and held his head and couldn't breathe. "My little girl thinks I'm dead."

Jim turned and sat on the table next to him. "But you're not, and you're gonna let her know, but for now you've got to stay dead."

"What are you talking about?"

"There's something going on. The Federation has got the situation all wrong here. We're still putting it together, but Marcus--"

"Marcus is the bastard that shot me down, and the Vulcans in the rebel city--

"You were in the rebel city?"

"--they say he's been at it for months. He's warmongering, Jim. Possibly even helping the guys he was sent here to stop. Where the hell is Pike in all this?"

Jim looked away, toward the dark window where the sound of waves crashed dully outside, "Pike's dead. Transporter accident. Scotty says there's no way it was a malfunction. That wasn't the first sign to us something was wrong. Comms were jammed to Starfleet command, and Uhura keeps picking up these coded comms between Marcus's ship and some place in the desert."

"I'm sorry about Pike, Jim, I know what he was to you. But you see the connection?"

"I do, but he's an Admiral, I'm acting captain. I try to stop him and I'm court-martialed or worse. Doctor M'Benga's agreed to declare him mentally unfit if he can document it, but we don't have enough linking him directly to it yet. Marcus has been overriding me at every turn. You should see that ship he's got up there. The USS Vengeance. It's built for battle not exploration, certainly not a mercy mission, and he's got this crew, all thick-necked jarheads. That's why you've got to stay out of sight. The ground sweep came to me first but rumors will spread and once Marcus knows we've found you... we need time, Bones.." 

"I don't have time," McCoy said, and stood again, pushing past Jim to the middle of the room. It spun a little and Jim caught him under the arms.

"How are you gonna find him out there, Rambo? Nobody knows where the Army's camp is located. You can't use a scanner, some electromagnetic force fucks with the equipment; we only found you in the ruins because a betazoid was walking point. And anyway, you can't even stand up straight."

"I don't need a scanner. I can medicate the rest."

"It's suicide and I need you here. Don't make me put a guard on you."

"I have to… I can't lose him, Jim," McCoy said, desperation clear in his voice.

Jim walked him gently back over to the med table and watched him, a little smile suddenly playing at the corner of his mouth. "You slept with the guy, didn't you? I tried to get you laid for four years and you fall in bed with the first Vulcan that saves your life?"

"Don't be such an infant," McCoy said, but he felt his face go hot.

Jim sobered, spoke quietly. "I know you wanna do this and as soon as I can I'll go with you myself, but for now you've got to stay here. Chapel can get in and she'll check on you but if anyone else so much as knocks you comm me." He handed McCoy a communicator. "Don't use the internal comms."

McCoy knew that voice and that look. 

"Alright," he said, defeated.

"Really?"

"Yeah, you're right. More lives are at stake."

Jim eyed him suspiciously, then sighed. "You are such a terrible liar. You always have been."

"I mean it, Jim."

"Promise me."

McCoy put his hand out and Jim looked at it, then shook it, holding McCoy's gaze and nodded. Then he turned and entered a code at the door and it snicked open and shut and he was gone.

In the sudden silent hum of the room, McCoy sat and waited for the drugs to kick in. He closed his eyes and felt for Spock. Certainly alive. He was sure he would know otherwise. The sound of waves persisted and he stood and walked slowly to the window, two storeys up, his reflection greeted him, the room bright and the night dark outside. He cupped his hand on the glass and looked out. Stretching beneath the starlight a dark sea rose and fell against the beach, foam surging white like the belly of a great snake along the strand. He watched it for a while. 

"I'm coming," he whispered to himself, to the night. "I won't leave you there."

He found his robe, canteen, the phaser Spock had given him and what was left of his medkit on a table in the room and he injected himself with the last of the tri-ox compound and filled another hypo and left a note for Jim on a PADD. At the door's security pad he tried Jim's birthday. The light flashed red and he cursed. He tried 1-7-0-1 and the light went green. The door slid open.

"Too easy, kid," he said.

The halls of the med compound were dark and empty, but he stepped quietly anyway, checking around corners listening for footsteps until he was outside and the night was hot around him. He headed for the hangar, glad for the cover of night and the dark robe, but there were too many personnel, guarding or working, to steal a vehicle. It would have been too conspicuous anyway. He backtracked, headed for the main entrance to the compound, hiding in the shadows, watching the guards work the gate controls and waited for an all-clear. When the chance came he stepped up easily behind them and stunned them both with the phaser, checked their pulses just to be sure, and apologized to their prone forms. 

When he opened the gate he entered the desert at a run, headed toward those red and silver points of light that were always watching, the wind at his back, the sound of the sea and the lights of the outpost retreating. 

This is what he had. He had a phaser and a canteen and part of a medkit and a compass in his mind that led to one thing. This is what he needed. He needed Spock.  
___

For the first couple of hours the sand was soft below his feet, his legs burned and he walked at times, but his lungs held out, growing used to the atmosphere and helped along by the tri-ox and the painkillers. Then the ground grew stony and he walked carefully through a forest of rock formations jutting out of the ground, many taller than him, some small, sharp and deadly, like stalagmites on a cave floor. He felt uneasy, a sense of warning, his field of vision obstructed, and more than once he thought he heard a scrape and shuffle behind him, but when he turned there was only darkness and starlight on slick obelisks and nothing more.

When the forest was behind him the land turned chalky and white as perlite, his shadow stretched over a puzzlework of soil that crumbled underfoot like dry clay while the stars turned slowly overhead. After a long time he stopped and drank, then ran for a while, then walked, and stopped again to think. The wind blew over the plain and picked up pale dust. He took a step and stopped.

He was lost. There was no longer any direction in his mind but 'here' and _here_ was nowhere and nothing. He turned in a circle, open horizon as far as he could see but for the distant dark shape of the rock forest.

"Where--?" he said. He looked down where the earth was disturbed and his heart should have sank but it did not. He dropped to his knees and dug with his hands. A few inches below the topsoil he found a panel of stone, glossy black in the chalky ground and covered in symbols he couldn't make out in the starlight and couldn't have read anyway. He inspected it, pressed on it, hit it, stood on it.

"Goddamn, cryptic Vulcans," he said. At last, he shot it with the phaser. It deflected the blow, knocked him backward and onto his backside and he cursed, but then the ground began to shake and then to lift. A door in the floor of the earth opened, wide enough for several men side-by-side, the top of it covered in a false layer of soil, and he crawled to the edge of it and looked down into a dimly lit tunnel.

He picked himself up and brushed himself off and descended down stone stairs, the ceiling lit with veins of blue light that could have been technology or could have been a naturally occurring phosphorescent mineral, just enough brightness to see the path ahead.

The tunnel stretched onward and he followed it, the compass in his mind and his heart once again spurring him on. Every split in the path was easily navigated, but he stepped slowly, carefully, the stone amplifying each small sound. Once, he heard voices, a Vulcan dialect that sounded different from the one in the ShiKahr. He couldn't make out the direction of it, the way that it carried in the tunnel, so he pressed himself against a wall and covered himself and his pale face in the black robe and waited until he could no longer hear them. 

Spock was close, he could feel it. It struck him then, buried under the earth, the blue minerals glowing like stars over the desert, that just days before he and Spock had been enemies, or at least as far as they had known when they woke in the sand. He remembered Spock's phaser pointed down at him, a terrifying shadow in the glare of the sun even as he tossed life-saving food at McCoy's feet. He remembered the grim figure on the mountain lit by lightning, reaching out to pull McCoy up by the hand. Then he remembered Spock's healing touch in the cavern, in Kir when McCoy thought he'd gone mad, in ShiKarh when Spock promised to never let him come to harm.

He held onto these things, meditating on them with every step he took closer, on the comfort they had brought him, the promise he would keep, and in his mind he repeated _I won't leave you here_ until it felt like a mantra. 

The tunnels snaked underground, half an hour at least he walked, until the path opened wide into a circular room and along the wall a dozen openings without doors, rock walls lit from within with that same blue lighting. He passed six of them without even looking to see who was jailed there, they could have been empty. He didn't care. He found Spock in the seventh, seated on the floor with his eyes closed.

He whispered Spock's name but there was no response. If these cells were like the brig on the Enterprise the door was a force field, so he picked up a pebble from the tunnel floor and tossed it. It snapped and sparked and sizzled mid-air. He cursed as the brightness blinded him momentarily. When his vision cleared, Spock was awake.

"You should not have come," Spock said gently, dirt and blood on his face and McCoy wanted so badly to hold him.

"Don't give me that self-sacrificing crap, I'm really pissed at you!" McCoy sat on his haunches, nothing and everything between them, feeling helpless. "Are you hurt? Goddamit I'm going to lobotomize those sons-of-bitches."

"I am not fatally damaged. I was meditating and tracking you."

"Was that you trying to scare me in the rock forest?"

"I was attempting to dissuade you from pursuing me, though I knew you would not be. Are all humans so stubborn?" There was a half smile at his lips but a pained expression in his eyes.

"Look who's talking. I'd have been here sooner but it turns out stealing a Starfleet sand rover is harder than stealing a sehlat." He moved as close as he dared to the force field. "Let me see you. I don't like the sound of your breathing."

"If you are going to persist in your rescue efforts, may I suggest you attempt to find a way to disarm the force field."

McCoy hesitated, he didn't want to leave Spock even if he couldn't touch him. The blue lights cast a sickly pallor over his face, turned green blood black.

"I go with you, Leonard, always," Spock said, sensing his hesitation.

"Any idea where I should look?"

"I was not conscious when I entered."

McCoy clenched his jaw, took a breath. "I'll be back," he said.

He circled the room, most of the cells were empty, from some of them bright eyes glinted in the halflight, watching him as he passed. He ran his hands along the wall, searching for a panel or anything he might not be able to see otherwise, glanced toward Spock but at that distance the cell was dark and there was no movement.

In the last cell he passed, something shifted, a white shape that shuffled forward, a grey-bearded Vulcan in a dingy white robe, furs over his boots that could have been sehlat skins. He motioned to Leonard and smiled, not a Vulcan smile, wide and manic, teeth white in the gloom. 

"Around the corner," he said quietly, a whisper, but with a laugh in it. "Down the first tunnel, control room on your left."

"Thanks," McCoy said, but he was wary all the same, and stepped wide around the cell opening, the Vulcan still laughing softly behind him.

It was there, though, down the tunnel, on his left, a smooth surface in the rockface void of blue light and behind the door a control room and a panel with twelve lights. He pressed the seventh and a light flashed from red to green. He considered pressing number twelve but did not.

When he passed back by the twelfth cell it was empty, or too dark, he couldn't be certain, but Spock was up and on his feet across the room and that was all that mattered. He stood crookedly and McCoy had to resist crashing into him. Instead he touched Spock's face, kissed him softly where his lips were not bruised and held him up and held him close. 

Spock said, "Perhaps any expression of affection or reconciliation should be postponed until we are out of danger."

"Damned Vulcan logic," McCoy whispered against his ear.

They made for the tunnel that McCoy had come through to find him, their pace slowed by Spock's injuries though he insisted he did not need help walking. McCoy was pretty sure he had some broken ribs at least.

After a while they came to a divide in the tunnel and McCoy thought he knew the way but soon he wasn't so sure, and soon after that he was certain he had made a mistake, but when they turned back, McCoy in the lead, he had retraced perhaps a yard before he was thrown back against Spock, a force field where one had not been moments before.

"It seems our movements have been detected," Spock said.

"You think?" McCoy said.

They continued the only way that they could and McCoy kicked up pebbles now and then to check for more force fields, avoiding several this way until it was clear they were being led. Soon the tunnel ahead showed a light, white and brighter than the blue walls. Spock's hand touched his shoulder when he hesitated.

"It is the only path," Spock said, and reached down and took McCoy's hand. McCoy kissed him again, briefly, gently.

"Just in case," McCoy said, and Spock didn't ask in case of what.

When they reached the light ahead the tunnel opened into a large, vaulted room, the walls dotted with blue tunnel openings like the one in which they stood, dozens or more, leading out in all directions at different levels, connected by a narrow path that snaked along the face of the wall. The white light shone from the center of the room, a semi-sphere, so bright it was hard to look at, and in the center of it a throne. Seated in the throne, a man. A Vulcan. He smiled, manic and greybearded and clapped his hands.

"Congratulations, Doctor, you've found your prize."

McCoy stepped back, gripped Spock's hand tighter, wanted to run though he did not know where, but there was a figure at his back, a Vulcan in white like the ones that had taken Spock at the ruins, and another behind Spock. They did not seize them and they held no weapons but it was clear that there was no running. Spock squeezed his hand and he stood straighter.

"You're the old Vulcan from the cell," McCoy said to the man in the throne.

"And you're Doctor Leonard McCoy." The Vulcan smiled. "My brother has told me much about you. Not willingly but all the same, I know of your journey." 

"Your brother…?" McCoy said and Spock stepped forward. 

"You will release McCoy, he is uninvolved, either in our war or our familial disputes."

"Wrong as ever, _sa-kai_ ," the Vulcan said and stood, walking toward them as his grey robes dragged the ground and he smiled, almost benevolently. "He is integral, as are you."

"Integral to what?" McCoy asked.

"Are you not now also going to demand that I release your _ashayam_ , Doctor? Your beloved? I had thought humans to be more reckless. You have certainly proven to be so up to this point."

"You won't, or you would have already," McCoy said.

"I might. Don't be so logical, it doesn't suit you."

"Did you bring us here for games, Sybok?" Spock asked, and McCoy looked between the two of them.

"Your brother is the leader of the Army of Light are you kidding me?" McCoy said it low under his breath but Sybok replied.

"Reformed Vulcans do not jest, Doctor McCoy. Haven't you discovered that by now?" He made a small gesture with his hand and the white-robed Vulcans behind them took hold of McCoy and Spock, too strong for McCoy to resist and Spock too injured to fight. At the last second that their hands still touched, McCoy felt an electric tingle in his fingertips. Spock didn't say it, but McCoy knew. _Just in case._

"You are not here for games," Sybok continued as McCoy and Spock were forcefully moved to stand before the throne, nearer to Sybok who approached them. "You are here as supplicants."

"To what deity?" Spock asked.

"To the god of death and the god of war."

"And which one are you?" McCoy asked.

Sybok laughed. "I am no deity, I am merely a vessel."

"You are son of Sarek, descended of Vulcan royalty," Spock said. "You have a greater fate than this."

"A greater fate than serving a god? He who has come at last? The god of death, wearing a human face. His vessel orbits even now, a great, black beast called Vengeance, bound for Sha Ka Ree."

"Admiral Marcus?" McCoy said. "He's not a god of death he's a power-hungry warmonger. If he's promised you anything it's a lie."

"He has promised me nothing but eternity. I have promised him a war and a planet," Sybok said, raising his arms like some demented Moses. Beneath the wide smile and false benevolence, McCoy recognized something there, reminding him of the old Vulcan at Kir who had projected his life's memories and madness and so much fear.

"You're not well." McCoy said. "You're confused. We can help. There are revolutionary treatments. I know this seems like something you have to do--"

"Will you cure me of my gifts, Doctor? The way that you have cured my brother of the disease of logic?"

Sybok stepped closer, still smiling, and reached out to touch McCoy's face. 

"Sybok, do not do this!" Spock shouted, twisting in the hold of his captor, his voice breaking, anger or agony at the pain of fighting, McCoy did not know.

"I know you have pain, Doctor," Sybok said even as McCoy felt the caress against his mind, gentler than he expected. "Your lonely life, your daughter, so far away… even now she believes you are dead… I can allow you to share it. I can take it away." His eyes were deep pools so close and, somehow, in spite of everything, McCoy was drawn to them. 

Then Sybok removed his hand, and like drawing a thread through the eye of a needle McCoy's anger came rushing back. 

"But I apologize that I must force more pain on you first. Great pain, Doctor, for I need a witness to the sacrifice. It was the will of the gods that you came together."

"What sacrifice?" McCoy asked, fear suddenly pooling in his belly.

Sybok crossed to his throne. "The greatest a brother can make." When he turned to them again he held a long staff that must have been a weapon from the way that he pointed it at Spock.

McCoy fought the hands that held him. Sybok was saying something in Vulcan but McCoy couldn't hear it. Everything slowed. He looked to Spock who was watching him, face soft and in his mind he felt a quiet warmth, like lying naked under the sun, like a hand in his and that electric tingle and Spock's lips and fingers soft on his face.

Then there was a pain in his shoulder and he was loose, lunging, falling, a flash and a shout and a great pressure, fire against his chest. Everything was white, the light too bright, and he thought that he heard Jim's voice but he couldn't have. There was shouting in Vulcan and phaser fire and the earth shook around them, but Spock was holding him. Spock was alive. He didn't want to leave him there, Spock said that he wouldn't, but McCoy thought, before his vision went from white to black, that he might not have a choice.


	11. Day 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Awake after all.

DAY TWELVE

The sound of the sea beat steady as a heart. It seemed to wash over him, warm, wet and foamy, dragging softly up his body and back. He could smell it, not salty or fishy, but tangy and antiseptic. A rumble, the crash of waves or thunder, and a flash of light.

McCoy woke slowly, a pain in his chest and another in his shoulder and the room too bright. Someone spoke to him. It sounded like nurse Chapel. She spoke to someone else and then the room was quiet again but for the sound of the waves and he slept.

When he woke again he knew that Spock was there even before he saw him, squinting in the blue light. He tried to raise a hand to shield his eyes but his shoulder complained.

"I would not advise that motion, Leonard," Spock said, holding his other hand. He was standing over McCoy, face still bruised but looking well. Feeling well, too, if the link was any indication. It had comforted him even as he slept.

"Why don't you tell me something I don't know," McCoy said and smiled.

"There is rather a lot that you do not know."

McCoy looked around the room. They were alone in a med room, identical to the last. He wore nothing but a sheet.

"Like how I got here, maybe?"

"You arrived by transport vehicle."

"Less vague, Spock. How come we're not dead underground?"

"I am not dead because you foolishly placed yourself between my body and deadly a phaser blast after dislocating your shoulder to escape your captor. You are not dead because the suit you wore was resistant to phaser fire, rendering your attempt at sacrifice unnecessary. We are not underground because Captain Kirk and a force of ShiKahr soldiers invaded the underground complex and arrested my brother. Additionally, Admiral Marcus has been arrested following an attempted attack on this Federation outpost."

"That is a lot."

McCoy sat up carefully, Spock helped him. The sheet pooled around his hips and his chest was a deep red and purple bruise.

"How long have I been out?" 

"Approximately thirty-nine-point-six-three standard hours."

"Approximately?"

"I could be more precise." 

"I know you could," McCoy said, and laughed softly but his chest ached. "If that suit was phaser-proof, why do I feel like I got hit with a missile?"

"Resistant, not impervious."

"I didn't even know something like that existed."

"It does not exist elsewhere. I designed it. If you will recall, I did once inform you that I was a scientist."

McCoy smiled, feeling utterly charmed by those dark eyes, gentle voice, and the soft caress in his mind that told him all of the things that Spock wasn't saying.

"How are you?" McCoy asked. "You look good." He raised his hand, winced at the pain in his shoulder but he touched Spock's face, his neck, spread his legs and pulled Spock to stand between them. "You feel good."

"I am well enough," Spock said, and McCoy didn't ask well enough for what, just pulled him closer and Spock kissed him like a starving man.

Jim walked in then and hesitated in the doorway. "Uh…Bones?"

"Jesus, kid, can't a man get a glad-you're-not-dead kiss without you interrupting?"

Jim walked in, a bruise on his jawline and cut on his brow, but he smiled, wide and familiar.

"Sorry. Glad you're back to your old self."

"I hear we've got you to thank for saving our asses," McCoy said. "Looks like you did it with your face."

"No thanks to you breaking your promise, which I will never forget or forgive, even if the note you left to contact Sarek was really how we got you out. Not that you were exactly hard to follow."

"Did everyone make it? In the raid? How many injured?" 

"A few…." Jim said, but his eyes flickered between McCoy and Spock, to their still joined hands. He smiled again and said, "Just… take it easy for now, Bones. M'Benga and Chapel have it under control." He turned to leave but paused at the last moment. "Oh, Mr, Spock, whenever you're free, Uhura's got some more questions about that Golic translation."

"I shall assist her as soon as I am available," Spock said, and Jim nodded.

McCoy looked back and forth between them, feeling betrayed. "What a minute, Jim. You're not poaching my Vulcan!" he shouted as Jim smirked and the door slid shut, leaving him and Spock alone again.

" _Your_ Vulcan, Doctor?" Spock asked.

"Yeah… well, maybe that's not the way to say it." 

"As we have not completed the _koon-ut-kal-if-fee_ ceremony we can neither of us claim even figurative ownership of the other." He reached up and ran his fingers through McCoy's hair. "However, I shall not argue the distinction."

"I thought I was going to lose you." McCoy said after a moment under the soothing attention. 

"You could not lose me, Leonard, even had I died."

McCoy winced at the words, then shook his head and laughed. "What a difference ten days make."

"Twelve," Spock said.

"Yeah, I missed a couple." He pulled Spock closer, mouth level with Spock's collar bone and kissed him there. "Well, what are we going to do now that I've got you?"

"You cannot remain on Vulcan indefinitely," Spock said, sliding his hand from McCoy's hair down to the back of his neck, warm against the bare skin. "The environment and atmosphere is too harsh and you would go mad in the dullness of ShiKahr.

McCoy looked up. "Dull? Darlin', I haven't had a moment's peace since I crashed on this planet. Anyway, like I told you, I'm not leaving you."

Spock bent his head and spoke softly near McCoy's ear, breath hot as the desert wind and between them lingered the scent of sandalwood and citrus, though McCoy might have imagined it.

"You will not," Spock said, and it sounded like a promise.


	12. Day 532

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On The Galileo Seven.

DAY FIVE-HUNDRED-AND-THIRTY-TWO

The Galileo Seven shuttle hurtled through the black, stars passing by the viewscreen slowly, distantly. Ahead of it, a red planet, the newest to join the Federation, behind it, the USS Enterprise in orbit. On the control panel a light flashed insistently, a whistle sounded, the Enterprise hailing.

"Dammit," McCoy said.

Spock moved to the controls and hit the audio-only button.

"Spock here."

"Commander Spock," Jim said, crystal clear through the speakers, however far he might have been, "something wrong with the visual?"

"Negative. Visual is functioning perfectly, Captain."

"Then why-- nevermind. Vulcan reports all clear for landing, Ambassador Sarek standing by for transport. What's your ETA?"

"Approximately sixteen-point-seven standard minutes."

"Excellent. Plenty of time for Bones to get his pants back on."

"That's harassment, Jim," McCoy shouted from across the shuttle.

There was silence over the comm that McCoy could swear was a grin. Jim said, "Kirk out," and the audio went silent.

Spock returned to where McCoy lay spread over an emergency blanket, their clothing folded carefully over a seat so as not to crease.

"He is correct," Spock said against McCoy's skin. "We should dress."

"We've got time."

"Very little of it should we wish to greet my father with some semblance of propriety. You do not hide your embarrassment well."

"Who says I'd be embarrassed? He was at the bonding ceremony; we're not breaking any rules."

"We have in fact broken several Starfleet regulations concerning sexual intercourse between crew, particularly during operation of Starfleet craft."

"Yeah, well, who hasn't?"

They dressed and refreshed themselves, using each other as mirrors, smoothing down hair and straightening dress uniform collars. There was nothing to be done about the small, purplish mark low on Spock's throat so McCoy just pulled Spock's collar over it and didn't mention it.

Spock took the shuttle out of autopilot and prepared for entry. The planet filled the viewscreen, swirls of red and orange, patches of blue sea and white sand, the shadows of mountains and the regular pattern of dunes, the graceful curve of pocked coppery earth.

"I think I might have missed this place," McCoy said, seated next to Spock at the helm. "It nearly killed me but it sure is beautiful." He smiled. "I could say the same about you."

"I do not recall ever threatening your life."

"Well I recall a phaser pointed at my head but I guess that's just me reading into things."

On the surface, the shuttle landed with a barely noticeable thump, the hiss of hydraulics and the cooling of coils even in the intense heat, and McCoy smoothed out Spock's hair one last time.

The shuttle door lifted. A wave of hot, dry air rushed in, the smell of blistering sand and mountain flowers. Out ahead on the landing strip, several dark figures stood. A drum sounded. A chime. McCoy smiled and Spock stood a little straighter.

They stepped into the sunlight.


End file.
